The Darkness & The Silence, The Light & The Music
by LittleGloriana
Summary: As Greg faces the painful aftermath of his hardest case to date, he gets by with a little help from his friends. Character study, shipper fluff, a little angst, confusion, and humor set in Season 6. 2nd of a series. Non-slash. Greg/OC/Sara/Nick/Hodges.
1. The Darkness & The Silence

**AUTHOR'S NOTE: I've been sitting on this one for a few months now, pieced together from what I'd planned as three separate projects featuring exposition on some of Greg's past as well as more development of the OC from my first piece (not required reading to understand this one but it might help in some areas). **

**Not sure if I love it or hate it. I usually don't upload until I'm finished, but in this case I figured I'd let you all have a look and check out any feedback you might have first. I certainly hope you might enjoy it (again, I'm a writer of dialogue, character studies, and humor first and foremost, though I hope to maybe do a story complete with a real mystery one of these days!). **

**Set sometime in the beginning of Season 6, definitely after "Gum Drops". Greg is a CSI Level One.**

Little whirlwinds of dust were visible beneath the amber glow of parking lot lights as Greg pulled into his apartment complex, and the mellow sounds of Hendrix's subdued electric guitars playing _The Wind Cries Mary_ spilled like waterfalls from the surround speakers. He put the car into park, leaning back in his seat with a sigh, taking a sip off the tepid coffee he knew it was way too late to be drinking. He'd just finished a double shift putting together all the evidence the D.A. was going to need for prosecution in a case that had been his hardest yet to deal with emotionally.

The elderly woman who lived in the rural outskirts of the desert with her three yellow Labradors, the woman who had been sleeping soundly when her trailer was invaded by an unknown while male with abhorrent intentions toward her. Her frailty, her astonishment, her willingness to relive the ordeal three times over for each of the different investigators whom required her statement.

Her youngest pup, the one who had fought for her, shivering in Greg's arms. The look of guilt in his round black eyes as Greg collected the blood evidence from his muzzle. Greg had stroked him, tried to tell him that he'd done more than enough to help, but he knew nothing he could do in that moment would take the trauma away. That particular evidence had cracked the case, landed the perpetrator in jail, and resulted in one more violent offender off the street. Greg had held it together, he'd remained objective and as far removed as possible, but the brutal reality kept lurking behind him, shadowing every step he took.

It hadn't been until Greg went driving through the streets of Las Vegas alone after shift that he finally started feeling the full impact. More and more he was becoming a true blue CSI, more and more he felt each case was changing him. He could not think of a case in recent memory where he felt he'd come out the other side as the same Greg Sanders he'd been going in.

This one in particular had caught him off guard with how deep it really went inside him. He was getting better at the art of shaking things off in the name of retaining sanity, but sometimes there was just nothing for it. Nothing he could do to but curl up in his bed until the disruption to his calm wore off, nothing he could do but hope that peace would be restored inside his mind once the next day began.

Greg took swallow after swallow from his paper cup of coffee until emptied, riding the waves of music around him as he drifted toward pleasant memories of surfing in Half Moon Bay. He could almost feel the exhilaration of gliding over the Pacific waters on his beloved Malibu board, the one with the black and red flames that used to match his hair color. How he used to feel so keenly entranced being out there alone in his own space, honing the craft and taming the waves. So masterful, so peaceful, so in control.

The sun was asleep behind the bluffs surrounding Vegas but the sky above Greg's apartment complex glowed an odd silvery blue from all the light pollution. He couldn't see any stars but he could see the bouncing beams from all the various spotlights around town, sweeping across the atmosphere as if they were dancing with each other. It soothed him, so much that he couldn't bear the thought of exiting the car into the silence of the parking lot and the emptiness of his apartment.

He felt an uncomfortable shudder in his chest as he heard a freestyle melody ringing of loneliness come sweeping into the car, his eyeballs growing hot in their sockets with every pluck of those melancholy guitar strings. Still Greg did not give in to the temptation to cry, he just took a series of deep breathes while imagining every inhalation was exercise for his skin to make it thicker.

He idly flipped through the contacts on his phone, a tingle going up his spine when he realized he had not talked to the majority of the people he saw before him in over a year.

He remembered a particular exchange with Warrick from years earlier, when he'd gotten a look at Warrick's contact list after borrowing his phone to order some lunch delivery. He'd always been good at calculating quick percentages in his head, and he had told Warrick he was impressed to see that over 70% of his lengthy contact list consisted of females.

At first Warrick had played it off like he was humbly claiming his status as the smoothest playa in Las Vegas, but then he fessed up that it was all show. Warrick told him he couldn't remember most of those women if he tried, that he only kept their names in his phone to make himself feel better, and that he couldn't recall the last time he contacted anyone he didn't know directly through work.

Warrick said it all just came with the territory when you were a CSI.

Back then Greg had still been Mr. DNA tech and he remembered being utterly amazed when he thought upon the dedication all the CSIs had. Marveling at the fortitude it took to do a job which left them so precious little leisure time to meet people and enjoy all the perks of an active social life.

As Greg sat listening to the melodies from the car stereo wrapping around him like a blanket, deleting contact after contact, he reminded himself of what a legendary social run he'd enjoyed since graduating Stanford. He looked at his tired reflection in the rearview mirror thinking a certain spark was absent, really unsure as to whether it was on break or permanent vacation.

He knew he'd asked for it, vividly recalling the day he had assisted Grissom in busting the murderous coin thief, the day he'd finally made up his mind to go after his aching desire to get out into the great blue yonder that was the field.

Greg made a point to think of every single instance since that moment when he'd been sure from within himself it had been the right choice. He remembered the morning he knew for the very first time without a shadow of a doubt he had found his home in Las Vegas. A home he respected, a home he loved, a home he wanted to serve and protect even if sometimes there would be those cases tempting him to doubt whether or not he was the kind of guy Las Vegas needed.

Greg thought briefly of calling Sara Sidle in hopes she might still be awake, he took a moment to revel in the comfort he found in thinking of having coffee with her. Then he sighed, folded his phone, and slipped it into the interior pocket of his jacket. He got lost in the sky for a little while longer before ejecting his mix CD from the player; giving it a kiss before snapping it back in its case. He held it tightly as he took another deep breath and finally exited his car.

The parking lot felt balmy and hostile as he made his way toward the flight of enclosed concrete steps leading up to his place on the second floor, feeling quite suffocated by the heat as he reached the top. He wiped some sweat from his weary brow, hastening his pace around the white stucco maze of hallways to his tall oak door. He grabbed the two newspapers waiting there, brushed his dirty boots on the sunny yellow "Welcome Home" mat his mother had placed there on her last visit, and keyed inside with a groan of relief once the blast of air conditioning hit his face.

His apartment was a comfortable open-plan appointment, if a bit ordinary in terms of architectural style, with muted slate gray walls and hardwood floors. A small rectangular living area lay directly to the left, a distressed brown sofa serving as a room divider. Another long sofa sat beside it completing the classic "L" formation, this one a more expensive black leather affair with a recliner built in at the very end.

There was a large television and stereo system sitting catty-corner; a wall of built-in shelves beside it with movies, books, forensic journals, vinyl records, CDs, and magazines stacked haphazardly wherever they would fit. Everything in the room was basic, from the tall chrome floor lamp to the woven gray area rug, and so modern it was on the verge of being nearly as cold and clinical as the lab. Greg had been meaning to change it for months, but never seemed to find the time.

To Greg's immediate right was the dining area; a square table in dark mahogany wood, four matching chairs, and a beat up old sideboard he loved for no other reason than the fact it had been handmade by his Papa Olaf. The furniture would have gotten lost in the grain of the wood floor but another area rug fixed that, this one Berber in gradient shades of cranberry red.

Upon the wall were lots of framed black & white photographs of 1920s New York, more than a few of them being artistic shots of the Chrysler building under construction. Beyond that was a similarly open plan kitchen; modern white cabinetry offering views of the contents through panes of glass, black appliances, butcher block counter tops and a long breakfast nook lined with three retro diner style bar stools.

Straight ahead of Greg was a hallway, a humble little office area through a tall archway on the left, and a brushed-aluminum-and-ivory palette bathroom to the right. Thirty paces directly in front of him was the entrance to his bedroom, and his brown eyes fell upon the door with an almost primal longing.

He dropped his keys into an old pewter ace-of-spades ashtray he bought at a record shop just because it looked so cool. He tossed the newspapers directly into the recycle pile knowing he would not even bother trying to find time to read them, and kicked off his boots with a deep groan of satisfaction once his feet were free.

Greg retrieved his phone from his interior pocket and placed it upon the sideboard along with the mix CD as he proceeded to strip down to his boxers right there in his entrance hallway. He placed his expensive sport coat over the back of a chair and padded through the kitchen, stopping at a small utility closet at the rear to dump his laundry in the hamper located there. He stopped in front of his fridge for a few minutes to kill the gnawing in his stomach with a few light bites of leftover prosciutto wrapped apple slices, followed by a few large gulps of milk. He could have eaten more but the silence was beginning to close in on him quicker than he liked, the ache in his chest starting to hurt like a goodbye at the airport.

In a flash he grabbed his mix CD and phone, shut off all the lights, and headed to his bedroom without even bothering to brush his teeth.

His room was much different from the rest of the place because he had taken pains to make it warmer and more welcoming in previous weeks. It was partially due to an article he read in GQ which suggested the nicer a man made his bedroom the nicer the sex would be with any female he brought there, and partially due to his own desire for a comfortable cave he could escape to when he needed it.

The walls were painted in a light cocoa brown with short pile carpeting in a muted plum color, both shades which Greg found had a very tranquilizing effect on him though he couldn't really pinpoint why. His bed was a very modern affair that lay very low to the floor and amounted to being a mattress inside a polished oak box.

Instead of end tables there were just two matching shelves mounted to the wall on either side, on the wall above the bed were retro style shadow boxes in all different sizes of rectangle and square. Greg made them himself with a saw, a drill, some screws and some wood stain and he was immensely proud of his accomplishment. The only problem was they had been on the wall for a good three weeks but he still could not figure out just what the hell to put into them.

Greg's eyes fell eagerly upon the crisp sheets and fat pillows of his bed but he did not succumb immediately, instead he walked over to the funky little oriental style dresser on the far side of his room. There stood a compact boom box resembling an oversized marshmallow, a clock radio, a hula dancer lamp Greg had owned since his junior year of High School, and a tray containing various watches, cuff links, boxes of breath mints, tie tacks, and loose change. Beneath all that lay his many dead cell phones, pagers, and ID badges of the past. Greg took off his watch and dropped it into the tray, then he inserted his CD into the little stereo.

His yawn almost split his head in half as he pushed 'play', put his preferred track on 'repeat', and made his final turn toward the bed.

Greg's room filled with the sounds of the same track he'd been listening to outside in the car, and he clicked on the fancy faux-candles Catherine Willows had given him for secret Santa one Christmas. They had come to be one of his favorite possessions because they allowed him to drift off in the ambiance of candlelight without having to worry about blowing the damn things out before losing consciousness completely.

As Greg took a moment to stare at the flickering glow dancing on his walls and soak in the sounds, he imagined himself traveling inside his mind to a place where the cutting reality of an innocent elderly woman laying in a hospital bed having to accept the unfair hand of cards she'd been dealt so late in life didn't bruise his heart so badly.

He thought once again of his first surfing adventures in Half Moon Bay, back when he was first beginning to break out of the fears he'd been plagued by in his sheltered upbringing and really become who he was always meant to be. He thought of standing on the rooftops of Brooklyn a couple years later, of watching the bustling city around him as if he were its king, and he thought of the times he'd done the very same thing in Vegas. He thought of the sweetest girls he'd ever met, their kisses, their embraces, and the luxurious sense of well being he had felt on those nights he had been given the privilege of falling asleep in their arms.

Greg's dark eyes were ever so slightly glossed as he crawled slowly into his bed, gazing off into nowhere as he slipped beneath the covers and let his head fall into the plump pillows. He flipped open his cell phone, the light shone from the little screen making him feel a little less alone. His heart was flopping around like a goldfish outside its bowl, his empathy for both the elderly woman and her faithful puppy beginning to spill over the brim. Greg let the music hold on to him, and he flipped through the contact list on his cell until one name was highlighted.

Sara Sidle.

He wasn't even sure he really even wanted to call her, he just felt comfort seeing her name there and knowing she was alive on the planet. He had long since accepted her affections lay elsewhere and always would, he had long since accepted she was an ocean with depths he didn't have diving experience enough to reach. That didn't matter to him, he just felt better knowing she was around. His empathy really started getting aggressive then, tempting him to start asking the kinds of questions he already knew would do him no good.

Questions that would not allow him to sleep.

Questions Grissom and the team always told him not to ask.

Questions like...

_Why?_

Greg felt a shudder in his chest and he rolled over to wrap his arms tightly around his pillow. The imitation candle still flickered away beside him and the sounds of the music still played on, but he felt as if the darkness and the silence were coming to get him anyway.


	2. The Girl Named Maria

Greg stared at the back of the guy's head with concentrated ire, wishing a genie would appear and grant his wish to make the man disappear with nothing but the sheer will of his mind. The evidence clerk, a one Mr. Neil Donovan, paid Greg no attention and had been doing just that for three minutes straight as he worked to clean the dry erase board behind the check-in counter to a brilliant white shine. Neil had raised his finger a few times in the universal gesture of 'just a second', but Greg did not consider that attention. He considered it three more reasons Neil was a complete asshole, this in addition to how the guy rolled up his sleeves to show off his biceps and styled his black hair into an Elvis type pompadour complete with sideburns.

He counted to twenty in his head, watching with growing hostility as Neil dragged a dry rag across his board at a snail's pace, and then Greg cleared his throat loudly. The evidence clerk stood up straight with his back to Greg, let out a sigh, and turned to him with a distinctly forced smile on his face.

"Okay, what can I do you for Sanders?" he asked, his blue eyes betraying a sarcastic glint behind his dark glasses.

Neil was a full two years younger and so Greg was extremely tempted to pull rank and instruct him to preface the 'Sanders' with a respectful 'Mister'. It was on the tip of his tongue, but he had been doing too good nurturing his newfound maturity to tarnish it by sinking to Neil's level. He just wanted to get his task done and get himself far away from the only man in the lab he found more insufferable than Hodges.

"I've got a necklace and brooch here from the pawn shop bust back in July. The D.A. doesn't need these pieces so I'm closing them out of evidence for return to the rightful owners" Greg informed him, sliding the completed forms and bagged items across the counter before the sniveling jerk had a chance to demand them.

"Wow, those look like they came out of a vending machine man, somebody actually wants them back?" Neil remarked in his deep baritone voice, shaking his head as he double-checked Greg's forms.

"Yeah, they're family heirlooms crafted by the hands of their dead Civil War ancestors, stolen from them in the middle of the night by crack heads. Some people are just overly sentimental I guess" Greg said in deadpan fashion, his voice teeming with condescension.

Neil betrayed no signs of noticing.

"You're telling me, it's like come on people let it go. Oh, forgot to cross your T's right here bro" Neil said, tapping the forms obnoxiously with the tip of his pen.

Greg put his head down before snarling, the paper almost ripping under the force he put on the pen. He filled out a registered mail form and packed up the items, dropping them into the outgoing mail safe with a grimace.

"Great, great. Say, since you're here and not doing anything, do me a favor and run this box down to trace for me, it's another load from Ms. Willows hippie murder thing. I already put you down on the chain of evidence sheet so you're good to go daddy-o" Neil told him without bothering to look him in the eye as he proceeded to stamp and file various slips of paper.

Greg opened his mouth to speak, but not one civil word came out and he restrained himself from saying the uncivil things at the forefront of his mind. He thought of how Neil made a habit of emptying the bowl of melt-away peppermints Judy Tremont kept at the reception desk before anyone else could get any, and Greg thought it might be a decent idea to plant one laced with a special chemical that turned urine an inky black color. He picked up the heavy box of trace evidence with a groan, knowing he had become mature enough to refrain from taking such an action toward Neil but not mature enough to deny himself the pleasure of thinking about it.

"Later gator" said Neil, pointing at Greg with a finger gun.

"Ho-kay" Greg responded curtly, flashing a fake smile of his own before exiting hastily.

Greg had almost called in that morning to take a sick day. He had never called Sara in the end so he just tossed and turned all night. He woke up feeling a drained, achy mess to the point he thought it might not even be a lie to say he was under the weather. He thought perhaps he deserved to play hooky but when he saw himself in the mirror that morning as he brushed his teeth, slack-jawed and empty-eyed, he decided he would probably be more haunted by his most recent case were he to stay at home rather than go into work at the lab.

What Greg had really been hoping for was to be cheered up, but Neil Donovan had succeeded in making him feel just the opposite. Greg had hoped he'd arrive there to find Nick or Warrick humoring him with a funny anecdote about their first days as crime scene investigators, he hoped for some playful banter over late lunch with Sara or Catherine, he even hoped Grissom might entertain him with an offbeat narrative or two about insect behaviors or some profound thing Lord Byron once said during a game of cricket. All the things Greg had come to take for granted he was suddenly craving like fresh Gooey Bunz.

He'd been at work for a little under an hour but all his colleagues were either busy wrapping up cases, finishing paperwork for upcoming court appearances, or out in the field. He himself had not a shred of paperwork left to file, he was just waiting for a dispatch assignment and if he was truthful he'd admit he was not going to feel disappointed if he didn't get one that particular day. He just wanted to be with people that made things feel alright.

With everyone else otherwise engaged, he knew there was only one remedy. Greg could have walked directly down the hall to trace but he chose to take the long way around the interior laboratory instead, making a beeline past the legal eagle and paper pusher offices. He was approaching risk management with great anticipation, and he was not disappointed as he glanced through the glass paned entrance way.

She looked like she had walked straight out of an issue of the fashion magazines Greg used to read with regularity. A bouncy cut of golden curls framing a tan face that was perfectly symmetrical as far as Greg could tell, adorable little freckles running across the bridge of her nose as if sprinkled there by god himself. Athletic body with the smoothest skin he'd ever seen on any human being, sapphire blue eyes and a big smile of pearly whites. Her voice was girlishly cute, though her words were precise, her points were intelligent, and her attitude was confident whenever she spoke. Once Greg had one brief conversation with the crime lab's newest risk assessment manager Maria Harcourt three weeks earlier, he'd been a goner.

Warrick had made a smart-ass remark about Greg being a stalker, but Greg preferred to think of it as nourishment for his fantasy life. He knew he'd eventually ask her out, he was sure of it, he just wanted to revel in all the different possibilities for as long as he could on the off chance she might refuse and take it all away from him. That day he felt he needed it more than ever, and he took shelter in the nice sensations he got thinking about what it would be like to be Maria Harcourt's boyfriend. He felt hopeful for good things in the world when he imagined wining her and dining her, he remembered there were always things in the world to look forward to when he imagined dancing the night away with her at The Bellagio or taking her on a picnic beside the glittering waters of Lake Mead.

"You gonna stare all day sport, or are you gonna buy somethin'?"

Greg started, and turned on his heels to see the one and only Nick Stokes standing not two feet away from him. Greg was glad to see him too, and he would have been gladder still if David Hodges wasn't standing there right beside him.

"For god's sake Sanders if you're gonna gawk do it on your own time, some people have actual work to do" said Hodges, rolling his baby blues as he took the brown file box of trace from Greg's arms.

"I wasn't gawking. I was...admiring" Greg defended, taking pains to sound smooth and self assured.

"You were gawking. If they gave out Olympic medals for gawking you'd bring home the gold Gregory" Hodges retorted, straining to keep a grip on the heavy box but adopting an awkward posture of strength in order to cover it up.

"She's definitely a peach Sanders. But I have it from reliable sources she's a peach who's been under very special investigation by our very own Detective Vartann. If you want in, you better get yer butt in there soon" Nick advised, grinning like the Cheshire cat.

"Guys, seriously. I've talked to her in the break room a few times, y'know...helped her fix her high heel when she snagged it on that crappy broken grate out front last week. We're really bonding" Greg explained, folding his arms with satisfaction.

"Oh, I get it. You're trying to be her go-to guy right? Show her your quality and she'll show you hers?" Hodges inquired, smirking from ear to ear.

"What? Show her your quality? Where the hell'd ya get that from?" Nick asked with a laugh.

Greg felt his ears prickle in recognition of the answer, and he tried like hell to stop Hodges from speaking but it was too late.

"Oh let me see now. Was it Nietzsche? Or...wait, maybe Wordsworth or Buddha? No...no...Oh, I remember now! That little nugget of wisdom came to us courtesy of one Mr. G. Sanders. Circa eight months ago in the crime lab locker room" Hodges recalled with a hefty dose of his hallmark smugness, his smirk giving way to a full-on grin.

Nick's own grin spread even wider across his face, though he got a glint of guilt in his eyes as he covered it with one of his big hands.

Greg narrowed his dark brown eyes at Hodges, glancing at the big box of trace before glancing back up at him.

"I'm sorry, didn't you say you had work to do?" he asked, curling his upper lip with a very antagonistic face.

"Yes indeed, seeing as my work here is done. Gentlemen..." said Hodges with a nod to each of them, smirking once again as he walked off with a renewed spring in his step.

Greg eyed him as he walked off, then turned his attentions directly back to the fair Maria. His expression was both longing and pain, and when he looked at Nick again there was also a flit of embarrassment.

"You do like those blondes. Don'tcha?" Nick asked in a conspiratorial tone.

"Blondes have more fun Nick. Trust me, I used to be one" Greg responded with a sigh as they both observed Maria reaching for a file located up on a high shelf.

"Hey look, as far as I'm concerned that girl is not out of your league, okay? But I meant what I said Greggo, you can't wait forever. I know Vartann comes off as a hard-ass but I've seen that cat in action and he's actually pretty good with the ladies, he likes his blondes too. You're not gonna let some flatfoot beat you out now are ya?" Nick advised, giving Greg a few hearty slaps of encouragement on his back.

"No way. It's cool, I'll probably see if she wants to get coffee after shift" offered Greg, a ripple of excitement growing in his chest.

"Okay, coffee's good. Dinner would be better though. Just sayin'" Nick said with an emphatic nod of his head.

"Right, yeah. Of course. Of course dinner's better" Greg agreed, nodding emphatically in return.

"I'd stick around for the fireworks but I gotta check in with Griss. If I get anything off dispatch you'll be my wingman so stay sharp"

Nick pointed at Greg as he walked off down the hall, jerking his head in the direction of Maria's office while mouthing the words "Go for it". He gave two thumbs up with a smile before disappearing around the corner.

Without the heavy box of trace in his arms, Greg suddenly felt more than a bit naked standing there in the hallway without a purpose. He pretended to examine a hole in the wall as various lab rats and paper pushers walked past him, flirting heavily with the idea of walking right into Maria's office to propose that dinner date.

He found his heart began to beat a little faster, and he took a moment to run his fingers through his brand new shag haircut. He took a couple of tentative steps toward her door, then he took two quick steps back. He paced for a few moments, and upon catching sight of his own nervous reflection he knew the timing was just wrong.

He was too worked up about the whole thing to dare going in there, as he knew his propensity to put his foot in his mouth if too nervous. He'd struck out with Mia Dickerson that way, and he wasn't about to do it again in a hurry. Greg continued down the hall safely away from pressure, telling himself all he needed was a good cup of coffee and some more time to shake off the distress from his previous case before moving in for the date.

His ears caught the sound of a familiar laugh, and like a moth to a flame he drifted toward the voice of Sara Sidle. It was coming from the break room for sure, so he quickened his pace in that direction with anticipation. He hoped he might get her alone for at least a few minutes to have a heart to heart about how to keep the violence of some people in the world from ruining the kindness of all the others.

Her voice was indistinct chatter as he approached, but it became loud and clear once he was a couple of feet away from the door. He listened to her words as she chatted with a companion and within a split second his hopes for meaningful conversation were dashed, and dashed hard.

"Okay, okay, I've been meaning to ask you...Why do you call Greg 'cheese doodle' all the time? Is there a story behind that?".


	3. From The Sanders Mythology

"Back in...I think it was our sophomore year at Stanford, Greg went gaga over this surfer girl. He was like, _sickeningly_ cute; deer in the headlights any time she walked into a room and he'd go into that dopey Sanders love trance, you know which one I'm talking about? Anyway, she was all into surfing and bumming around with the beach crowd while Greg was still pretty shy and hanging out with all of us science nerds. He started reading everything on surfing, he researched it exactly the same way he researched theorems. Tons of books, and even periodicals and documentaries. I think he watched 'Endless Summer' like five hundred times. He went out and bought this humongous surf board, he got the flashy Ron Jon swimming trunks and went full on peroxide blonde. He had all the gear, but he still had the complexion of a pasty white lab rat, right..."

Nina was telling the story with exuberance, her raspy little singsong voice bouncing off the walls to the point Greg was sure even the passing tourists outside the building could hear her. He wanted to bang his head against the wall or find something non-lethal to beat her with, but he just wound up standing there looking very much like a defeated zombie.

"...His whole plan was to show up at the beach with all his newfound surfing knowledge and impress her, but he didn't want to go there looking like an albino with porphyria, y'know? So..."

Nina stopped talking momentarily to giggle, and Greg stopped brooding momentarily to rue the day she'd ever entered his lab.

"...So he figured the best solution for a quick tan was buying some of that self tanner lotion. You've gotta remember this was back in like, 1992, so they hadn't come close to the quality of the ones they put out now. He gets this stuff and puts it on, doesn't see any difference, so he puts some more of it on. Then he slathers on a different brand, and I think he even used some kind of tanning foam on his ears and feet. Sara, after about an hour he was just plain _orange_. I mean, he was so upset I swear I really almost cried but it was just so funny. His roommate started calling him 'Kentucky Fried Sanders' but I said he actually looked more like a cheese doodle on legs. The name stuck even after he got his regular complexion back, because, well, cheese doodle just sort of suited him. I think it still kinda does"

Nina's chesty giggling stung hard enough, but it was Sara's bursting laughter that really hurt. Greg knew he had a choice to make. He could either walk in there all pissed off or he could resign himself to accept his most trusted colleague now had new insight on the outrageous lengths he'd go to impress a girl. He knew Sara was keen enough to have figured that out quite some time ago, but it still bugged him to know she'd been given a whole humiliating play-by-play compliments of Sorrensen.

He took a deep breath, and walked into the break room with a very tight, very humble, very wry smile upon his face. As soon as the two women caught sight of him, it set off a fresh chain of laughter.

"Yes, the cheese doodle himself has arrived" Greg said simply, shooting Nina an evil eye that caused her to slap her palm directly over her mouth.

"What could I do? It's a classic in the Sanders mythology" she reasoned with sparkly apology in her gold flecked eyes .

"So wait, wait. What happened with the surfer girl?" Sara inquired, flashing him the smile of understanding Greg always thought was like a mind-meld between them.

"Oh, see, here's the best part. He totally got a date with her, like a month later after he recovered from the humiliation" Nina added, an odd sort of pride trickling through her words.

"Reeeally?" Sara confirmed, sounding intrigued and even a little bit impressed.

"Yeah, I got the girl in the end. For like a week. Actually turned out to be kind of an airhead" said Greg.

"You mean pothead" Nina corrected.

"Okay, both"

Greg rummaged through the fridge for any food that looked abandoned and delicious, but only found a shriveled half of apple and a container of pickled beets. He opted for the vending machine, buying a bag of miniature Oreos and a package of powdered donuts to share before sitting back down, across from Sara with Nina directly on his right.

"It's hard for me to imagine you being shy Greg, I have to say. Either of you get any video evidence of that? You know, for scientific purposes" Sara quipped, shooting Greg a mischievous twinkle.

Nina looked at Greg, then at Sara.

"I didn't mean to say he was shy with everyone, just the girls he liked..."

She looked at Greg again.

"I mean you opened up so much more by senior year. Seems like you got _really_ slutty in New York though, you still haven't told me what happened there" Nina finished, her arms raised above her head as she began braiding her mane of chestnut curls.

"A lot of things happened there, things far too risqué for this break room. And I resent the suggestion I'm slutty. I'm never slutty, I'm just-" Greg began, before he was cut off.

"Friendly?" offered Sara.

Greg grinned.

"Very friendly" he said with a decorous nod in her direction.

Then he turned to Nina and promptly stuck his tongue out at her. She smiled her cherubic smile, scrunched up her nose, and promptly returned the favor.

"Well, as much as I have enjoyed today's lecture in Sanders mythology class, I've got a date with Warrick and a jilted wife with a gun license down at PD" Sara said, checking her phone and stretching slightly as she rose from her spot at the table.

"Lucky you" Greg said, holding out the opened package of donuts for her to snag some.

"Let's do this again. See if you can get Nick and Warrick to enroll, I think they'd enjoy it" Sara told Nina, flashing Greg another mind-meld smile as she grabbed her share of the donuts and made for the door.

"Hey Sara, gimme a call later if you can. Some case stuff I wanna go over with you" Greg called to her.

"Will do, catch you guys later" she replied, raising her arm straight over her head in a parting wave.

Greg felt a little trickle of disappointment at her exit, but it was short lived in the face of the business at hand. The break room went quiet as Greg thrust his hands into the pockets of his jeans, leaned back in his chair, and stared down his nose at Nina.

She sat there in her mint colored A-line dress, picking little bits of donut with her pink polished fingertips, dropping crumbs into her mouth with a guilty look on her face.

Greg sniffed deeply with a scrunch of his nose.

"So what else did you tell her?" he asked with seriousness, doing his best impression of Jim Brass during interrogations.

"Stuff" Nina responded with a slight smirk and a shrug, sucking some sugar off her fingers before stirring the untouched cup of steaming coffee before her.

"What stuff?" Greg asked, sliding the open bag of Oreos away from her before she could take any.

Nina's jaw dropped open in an expression of mock shock. She gave a brief pout, then quickly proceeded to get a very determined look on her face as she tried retrieving the bag from him without getting up from her seat. Greg's arms were much longer than hers, so he didn't even break a sweat holding it away from her.

"Give it up shorty, they're mine. What stuff?" Greg asked in a nonchalant manner, ignoring her attempts to retrieve the bag like a father ignoring a begging child while he was on the phone.

Nina tried for a few more seconds, then promptly gave up with a sour puss expression and a slight kick to the rubber soles of his sneakers.

"Nothing bad, I swear. She asked how we came to be lab partners all the time and I just told her the truth" Nina told him with a shrug, placing a stir stick beneath her nose horizontally and holding it in place with her upper lip.

"The truth being...?" inquired Greg, suppressing the urge to smile at how pleased she was with her goofy plastic mustache.

He regarded her with suspicion in his eyes, and Nina rolled hers.

"That we were both compulsive overachievers and everyone friggin' hated being partnered with us. That they shoved us together so we'd just annoy each other and stop annoying them" she said with casual resignation, like it was yesterday's news.

"Excuse me? You were the one with the chip on your shoulder, not me. No offense, but you could be pretty aggressive when you wanted to be. I partnered with you because no one else would. Alcott actually asked me flat-out to do it. The brigade thought I was the best guy for the job since I was cool and good natured enough to handle your mood swings. I mean, I'm honestly sorry to tell you that, but it's the truth" Greg kindly informed her, hoping her feelings wouldn't be too hurt by his revelation.

They didn't seem to be, because she smiled.

"Yeah, I _know _it's the truth. Alcott came to me with the same exact thing, but about you. Y'know, the whole spiel about how you made things more complicated than they had to be...how you pushed so hard even the professors avoided you in the halls, sound familiar? Oh, and I bet every time Alcott asked you that favor he promised you a dinner at Beefsteak Willie's at the end of the semester, right? As a thank you from the brigade for putting up with my crap. Am I right?" she asked, her face one of anticipation.

Greg's jaw went slack, and he huffed in disbelief.

"Yeah" he replied weakly, the wool slowly coming away from his eyes.

Nina whipped her braid over her shoulder, following Greg's example and leaning back in her chair with hands clasped behind her head, nodding slowly in self satisfaction.

"Yup" she said, flashing him a toothy grin.

"That two faced bastard" Greg added, for good measure.

"Yuuuup" Nina repeated, a little touch of mock mournfulness trickling into her tone.

"How did you even find that out? What did Alcott post it on his Alumni webpage or something?" he couldn't help but ask, flicking crumbs off the table like they were annoying insects.

"No, Elliot-" Nina began, before she caught herself.

She made it a point to refrain from calling her ex-husband by his first name anymore, a decision Greg vehemently supported. From the day Greg first met him at Stanford he'd always thought referring to that particular shithead by a first name gave him way too much undeserved humanity.

"I mean Mendes told me over some pretty loaded Margaritas one night" she finished, reaching out and snatching the bag of Oreos from Greg without further ado.

"It doesn't matter now, we graduated with honors and they didn't. I always had more fun with you anyway" she finished.

Greg watched as Nina separated a tiny Oreo cookie in her hand like it was a fragile piece of trace evidence, scraping the miniscule bit of cream filling off with her bottom teeth. He was tempted to ask her about any other backstabbing and treachery he might have missed out on back at Stanford, but he remembered he was aiming to get away from aggravation rather than step into any more of it. He just sighed, dropped his elbow down on the table, rested his cheek in palm, and stared at Nina's still untouched coffee.

"You gonna drink that?" he asked halfheartedly, mumbling a little through his lips.

"Nah, I didn't even want it, I think I just wanted to make it" Nina said, sliding the cup in his direction with a yawn.

"Thanks" he mumbled, taking up Nina's abandoned mantel of idle stirring.

Nina munched away on the cookies, her big eyes falling upon Greg as he stared off into space. She tilted her head to the side, frowning slightly with a subtle expression of sympathy.

"Awe c'mon, don't look like that. So we went to college with a buncha conniving bums, who cares. Are you really that bothered or is it something else?" asked Nina, giving a series of gentle pokes to the back of his hand with her fingertip.

Greg looked over at her, feeling himself relax a little bit when he recognized true concern behind her eyes. It felt good to be asked, it felt good to have a window of opportunity to talk. He thought about telling her about the case, but when he saw how carefree and airy her demeanor seemed to be in that moment he didn't want to do anything to really damage that in any way.

It was another thing Greg was finding out just came with being a CSI. To outsiders, like Warrick's new wife or Nick's visiting college friends, his team came off clannish and somewhat codependent at times. Outsiders often seemed to take their hesitance to include them like a rejection, but they were grossly misunderstanding the point. The members of his team were the only ones with whom he could discuss the unseemly details of cases without worrying he might mentally scar them in some way, shape, or form. His team didn't stick together so closely that way because they wanted to discriminate against others, they did it because they wanted to spare others.

Greg found it harder and harder to talk about his job, having made the rookie mistake of sharing too much with a cute girl who was a real estate agent. All he talked about was dissecting a brain to retrieve a bullet and how there were machines that used sonic waves to clean tissue away from bullets without destroying evidence. That was all it took and he could see her discomfort with painful clarity. She never called him again, and he'd learned to keep more and more to himself, sharing only with those who did the same thing he did on a daily basis.

Nina was a little bit different, she grew up with a family of cops and worked right there in the crime lab too; but she was still a stone cold lab rat. She could handle conversations about machines that cleaned human tissue from bullets and she didn't flinch over talk of severed heads or accidental disembowelment via rusty rebar. That was a repulsion easily overcome when you had a head for science, it was the emotional impact of the human element in the field that truly separated CSIs from lab rats in the end.

She was just as moody as anyone else, but when Greg really took the time to think about it he considered Nina to be one of those people who just possessed a very cheerful soul. He knew she'd seen her share of pain in her life; her mother had died when she was only eleven, she had known poverty, and she'd come through a divorce. Even still, she was just one of those people who had a knack for being consistently upbeat. While Greg often wanted to tell her more things, he felt sharing the really harrowing case details with her would be a lot like wiping his dirty hands on a white tuxedo jacket.

"Nah, I'm fine" Greg told her, giving her a wink of assurance.

Two seconds, and Greg saw she wasn't buying it.

"It's that chickadee, isn't it? The blondie from risk assessment right?" she half asked, half announced.

She poked him again, this time in his armpit.

"Cut that out. No. She's fine. I mean, I'm fine. I've got it covered." He insisted, the smallest hint of a conciliatory smirk playing at the corners of his mouth.

Nina dropped her head to the table and let out a muted groan of frustration. She let out a raspy giggle from her chest, her face flushed a rosy shade as she picked her head back up with a giant grin.

"We just got through talking about the infamous surfer girl from almost ten years ago and here you are in 2005 doing the same exact things you did back then. You know what your problem is?" Nina rattled along with haughtiness, shaking her head from side to side.

"No, but I'm puh-rit-tee sure you're gonna tell me" Greg said with sarcastic resignation.


	4. Nina & Nicky

Greg made a show of spinning his chair around, straddling it and flopping his butt down, pulling it in as close as it would go to the break room table. He straightened out the sleeves on his wine colored hoodie, took a deep breath through his nose, then pretended to stretch his arms. He stretched his neck from left to right, gripped the chair-back tightly, and stared directly at Nina to show her she had his absolute full attention.

"Okay, I'm ready" he said.

Nina narrowed her eyes at him, twisted her lips out of a smile, and then she backhanded him on the forearm.

"I'm serious!" she said.

"Oh, I know. So am I. One hundred percent" he replied, flashing her a playful smile like an eager little boy waiting to be told a gory horror story.

"Look, I'm just gonna say this whether you take me seriously or not. Your problem is that you don't hesitate asking out all these trendster, arm candy girls like that wannabe Punky Brewster hostess at Benny's, but when you think a girl really has potential you just plod along and spend way too much time building her up inside your head. Catherine told me about your crush on Sara. How you carried this massive torch for a whole year before you even tried asking her out? Let me tell you, I was not shocked" Nina explained with authority, her words on the critical side but her tone of voice remaining gentle.

"You sure? Cause you do look kinda shocked" Greg helpfully pointed out, tilting his head to the side like a psychologist regarding a particularly worrisome patient.

Nina did not acknowledge his antagonism.

"I'm just saying I wish you wouldn't be such a masochist. You wait and wait, you put the girl up on a pedestal that's taller than the friggin' Stratosphere Tower. You torture yourself thinking you'll never be good enough for this fantastical vision you've created inside your mind, then you finally ask the girl out and boom! She comes tumbling down off that pedestal, you mope around with that heartbroken face, and then you go and do it all over again. Why would you do that to yourself Sanders? Why?"

Nina's mouth hung open just slightly as she awaited her answer, but Greg needed a few moments to process everything she'd said. He vaguely recalled hearing the same exact thing from her at some point in the past; the speech buried at the bottom of his mental storage bin of things to reflect on at a more opportune time. He had a feeling she might have a somewhat solid theory there, one he was almost tempted to delve into with further discussion. Then he looked at her face, that know-it-all pixie expression she got whenever she seemed to think she was god, and he quickly understood his only course of action was good old fashioned contradiction and denial.

"Don't hold back, tell me what you really think" he said, blowing some air through his lips with a slight bulge of his eyes.

"I think I just did" she replied succinctly.

"Look, Maria's not a girl, she's a woman, and I'm not putting her up on a pedestal. I haven't had time, she just started work a month ago Sorrensen. Maybe I did that kind of thing before but I'm past that. Maybe you need to pay a little more attention because if you did you'd already know that..." Greg began, feeling the momentum building.

"There's nothing wrong with having a few conversations with a woman to see if I even really want to ask her out at all. Sure, I like thinking about what might happen if we hit if off but who doesn't do that when they've got their eye on someone? I'm not shy, strike-out Sanders anymore; you need to accept that. I'll ask her out when I'm good and ready, thank you very much Dr. Phil" Greg finished, firmly but without hostility, holding his ground so well he was rather astonished to find he believed every single word he'd just said.

Nina opened her mouth as if she was going to whip something back at him, but once she looked directly in his eyes she exhaled all the breath she held in her lungs. She studied him critically for a moment, the light from the iridescent bulbs above giving her hazel eyes the translucent quality that sometimes imbued Greg with the unsettling feeling she could see right through him.

Then her face softened.

"I'm sorry" she said.

Greg did a double take.

"Repeat that"

"I said I'm sorry damn it"

"One more time"

Nina leaned in on the table, stopping just a few inches away from his face.

"I'm sorry, meaning I can see I misjudged you completely and ran my big mouth like you're a twelve year old or something. I'm sorry meaning...I wish to inform you I feel great remorse for my behavior Mr. Sanders" Nina told him in a very dignified manner.

Greg let it sink in, replaying it a couple of times in his head as he searched her face for any signs of lying. When he didn't find any, his lips spread across his face.

"Wow, that's uh...that's different" he said honestly, unsure whether he was more shocked or impressed.

"Did you enjoy that?" she asked in a tone one might use on a puppy who'd just been given a good scratch behind the ears.

"Ch'yeah, I think I did" Greg told her with absolute conviction.

He exchanged a grin with her then, feeling a little tremble of anticipation in his chest, instantly reminded of all the times in college when they'd get bored and decide on the fly to go do something stupid together. He felt a little ensnared in her eyes for a moment, riding a warm wave of something conspiratorial and familiar. Greg's eyelashes fluttered in slow motion, then he leaned comfortably back in his chair for a satisfied sigh and a nice sip of coffee.

She narrowed her sparkling eyes at him.

"Dodo" she teased, softly with a begrudging sort of smile.

"Dummy" he retorted right on cue, twinkling at her as he brought the cup slowly up to his lips.

Five seconds later, he was almost gagging.

"Neen what the hell? Is this instant?" he exclaimed, using a napkin to wipe his tongue.

"Yeah, I brought it from home. It's cheap!" she said enthusiastically.

"First off, uh yeah it is. Second, you say that like it's a good thing. I had human decomp land in my mouth last month and this crap makes me nostalgic for it, that's how wrong it is. Why would you drink this? Why would you do that to yourself Sorrensen? Why?" Greg echoed her own words, digging into his pocket for his box of breath mints.

"Sanders, I'm not a coffee nut like you, the psychotropic effects of caffeine are all that matter to me and you don't have to pay through the nose for the kick. All the stimulants I need for ninety-nine cents? Hell yeah and yeehaw" Nina said, slapping her hands together with satisfaction.

Greg shook his head at her with pity, furiously pulverizing wintergreen Tic-Tacs in his jaws two at a time.

"Did I just hear a yeehaw in here?" came the friendly voice of Nick Stokes as he poked his head in from the hallway.

"Yeah! I'm trying to get Sanders to sign-up for the amateur rodeo that's coming to town next month. I think he'd look great in a pair of chaps and a cowboy hat, don't you?" Nina joked, shooting Greg her most wicked smile.

"That would be somethin', but I gotta say I'm more interested in hearing about Greg here havin' to walk three miles through the forest wearing nothin' but a leotard and flip flops" Nick responded, looking at Greg with an animated expression of great interest.

Before Greg's eyes could bulge entirely out of his head, the break room was echoing with the loud scraping noise of chair legs on tile as Nina rushed up from the table.

"Whoa, holy crap I gotta get back to work before Hodges gets me fired" she said quickly, making a beeline for the exit.

"Sorrensen!" Greg called after her, rising from his chair.

She grabbed her lab coat in her fist, nearly tripping over the trash can, and stopped only briefly to pat Nick on the shoulder before escaping.

"I'll catch ya later cheese doodle! Bye Nicky!"

Greg sighed, exhaling a big breath before collapsing back into his chair with a thunk.

Nick sauntered in the room, taking the seat opposite Greg with a very serious look on his face. He kept his mouth tight, his dark black brows furrowed with concern.

"Ya know, talking about it might help but I understand if it's just too painful" Nick said, without even a flicker of a smile.

Greg looked at the floor, then looked up at Nick.

"It was just a prank, man. All the guys had a bonfire night at one of the lakes, we had some drinks and I passed out first. Next morning I woke up alone in the old birthday suit, and there was this ballet leotard there and the flip-flops with a note that said 'have a safe trip'. Standard college tomfoolery Nick, actually kinda boring if you ask me" he explained, trying to make it sound as uninteresting as possible.

"Yeah, but Sara said Nina told her it rained on your way back? The leotard was white? Acne on your butt that got you nicknamed 'pizza ass' for awhile? That doesn't sound boring to me" Nick explained, finally cracking into his massive grin.

Greg shifted in his chair with a couple of obnoxious sighs.

"That girl just never knows when to shut up. I don't think she even knows _how_" Greg whined, twisting the empty cellophane cookie bag into a rope before tying a tight, fat knot in it.

"Come on now Greggo, she didn't mean any harm. Did you see her pitch a fit when you told us about her walkin' around all day with 'NERD' written on her forehead? Have a sense of humor man, we've all got stories" Nick offered in older brother fashion, picking up Nina's abandoned cup of coffee for a sniff before wincing at it.

"Whatever..." responded Greg, finishing off the last of the donuts with a scowl, "So do we have anything to do around here or what? I have dry cleaning that won't pick up itself y'know"

Greg flung all the wrappers toward the trash can only to watch helplessly as they bounced off the rim. He gave a huff as if clearing phlegm from his throat, pulling himself out of the chair to pick them up with such a lazy slouch it appeared his lower extremities must weigh fifty pounds a piece.

Nick regarded Greg like he couldn't believe the sight of him, then he rolled his eyes with resignation as he got up to fetch himself a soda.

"Catherine's getting that truck from her homicide towed in as we speak, soon as she gets here I'm headin' over to the garage to help process. You, my friend, have one of two choices. Griss said you can hit the computer room and finish up your proficiency exams in explosives and firearms identification, or you can help out your best buds Hodges and Sorrensen in trace. I know you're probably thinkin' exams but just a reminder, anything you do on Catherine's case is gonna count as time in the field and you need it if you wanna hit level two before next June" Nick informed him, taking a few thirsty swigs off his can of root beer.

Greg relaxed his weight against the countertop behind him, staring off toward the hallway toward reception wishing Sara would appear with some more free time on her hands. When that didn't happen, he just blew some air through his lips.

"Lucky me" he said simply.

"Just suck it up, man. I know Nina's a little bit..._wired_ sometimes but come on, at least when it comes to the job she gets it done. I know I don't mind processing with her" Nick added affably, buying another root beer and tossing it gently into Greg's hands

Greg was thinking up a response to that when he noticed Nick wasn't even expecting one. He watched as Nick stared off toward the trace lab with a weird half smile on his face, and Greg couldn't help but wonder how his colleague had suddenly became such an expert on Nina Sorrensen. He flashed back to Nina's hasty exit, how she'd touched him on the shoulder and called him _Nicky_. Not Nick, not Mr. Stokes like she used to, but _Nicky_.

Greg's eyebrow went up of its own accord as he took a deep sip from his can of soda, and then the hairs on the back of his neck stood straight up.

"I didn't realize you and Sorrensen were such good processing buddies"

Greg had been expecting to come off sounding jocular and friendly, hence he was a little surprised when he heard himself sound so accusing.

Nick threw him an incredulous twinkle.

"Well, she's been here almost a year Greg, we _have_ processed evidence together from time to time. I don't know if we're good processing _buddies_ just yet, but we're definitely past the processing _acquaintances _stage of our professional relationship" explained Nick, very directly, laughing through his nose as he turned his attentions toward the beeping alarm of an incoming text message on his phone.

Greg stared at his colleague, wanting to look away but feeling his dark eyes were locked on him.

"What's zat supposed to mean?" Greg asked, curling his upper lip ever so slightly.

"It _means_ that if you were a dog, Nina'd be a fire hydrant. Catherine's waitin' on me in the garage man, I gotta skedaddle" Nick replied nonchalantly, gulping back the last of his soda before using the empty can to shoot a flawless three-pointer right into the trash bin. He shot Greg a grin, then he sauntered out the door without another word.

Greg stood in the now silent break room with breath in his chest, holding it there as if waiting to shoot his comeback at any moment should Nick reappear. When he realized Nick wasn't coming back, he took to grumbling over the top of his soda can. He could plainly see by the placement of hands on the clock that it was high time he did some actual work, but even the lecturing warden in his head didn't make his feet move upon the ground.

Greg decided Nick was definitely hiding something, and he wondered why he just didn't come out and say what it was. Greg felt stupid for not having seen it sooner. He remembered the first day Nina showed up in the lab almost nine months earlier, how the first thing Nick ever said about her was how she was a peach. Nina's father was an old cop born and raised in El Paso, Texas. Her brother was a football playing frat boy turned civil servant just like Nick. It was a foregone conclusion if anything, a no-brainer, that they would be attracted to one another and end up married on some dude ranch with dozens of affable children.

"Fire hydrant my ass" Greg mumbled, taking short bubbly sips between his lips as he stared through the floor.

"What was that?" came a disembodied female voice from somewhere outside of Greg's thoughts.

It was confident, girlishly cute, and vaguely familiar. It took a good 2.5 seconds for it to register, then it was all Greg could do not to choke on his soda as he whipped around to face her.


	5. Waiting For The Look Back

"Hey Maria! How goes it over in risk management today?" Greg greeted her, surreptitiously wiping some dribbled root beer from the front of his shirt while clambering to regain control of his powers of flirtation.

"Ugh! Been fighting all morning with Ecklie. We're trying to replace the door to the trash chute on the second floor, you know the one by the water fountain? Total hazard!" she said cheerfully as she poured some coffee into her LVPD mug.

"Oh yeah, yeah! That thing snaps like a crocodile, it's amazing there aren't more lab rats with hooks for hands" Greg blurted out nervously, regretting it almost immediately with a wince she did not see.

He was expecting the patented 'awkward pity chuckle', hence he was pleasantly surprised when she let out a robust laugh complete with an adorable toss of her head.

"Now that is _too funny_" she replied, struggling to reach the unopened container of non-dairy creamer stashed at the back of the top cabinet above her.

Greg sprung in to action immediately to assist her, taking liberty to open it up for her himself once he retrieved it. He handed it to her with his best boyish smile, still amazed she seemed to find his joke so amusing when he himself thought it was crap at best.

"Love the new haircut" she offered, stirring her coffee slowly with elegantly manicured fingers wrapped around a long plastic spoon.

Greg cleared his throat, painfully aware he was not pushing his break time as much as he was growing closer to straight-up slacking off. He pushed thoughts of Nick and Nina out of his mind in order to put every bit of his focus on Maria.

He usually liked saving the big guns for dates and otherwise intimate settings, but he was so pressed for time he felt compelled to pull some out right away. He gave her his patented bedroom eyes, the ones which made girls putty in his hands if he flashed them correctly. He tilted his head back ever so slightly, curling the side of his mouth into his cheek while he let his eyes roam her. It was a classic move, one he used with great success time and time again.

He knew if it worked, he could ask her for that dinner date after all.

He knew if it worked, he could leave shift with something to look forward to.

He knew if it worked, he might not have to go home to the darkness and the silence again.

"Thanks..." Greg began, imagining he was Dean Martin or James Bond, "...I like switching things up as often as I can, I like to keep things fresh, y'know? They call it _the 21st century shag_"

Greg made a show of smoothing back his hair, narrowing his eyes and puffing out his lips in a smirk. He let the smirk linger for only a few seconds before letting his natural smile take over, to let her know he was just kidding around, to let her know he was just playing.

She seemed to respond quite well.

"It's very chic" said Maria in no uncertain terms, holding his gaze with her bright blue eyes for a good five seconds before looking away.

Quite well indeed.

"Thanks" Greg replied, going from self assured to flat out sheepish, grinning from ear to ear.

Maria looked back at him, and she suddenly went a little sheepish herself. Greg retained eye contact with her as he took a deep drink of root beer, feeling pretty stoked that she seemed to like looking at him so much. He felt confident enough to wiggle his eyebrows at her, and so he did just that before gulping and releasing a gratified sigh.

"That's the good stuff" he said playfully.

"You uh...you've got..." she began, baring her own teeth and indicating the space between with her French tips before indicating his.

Greg opened his mouth to say "Huh?", but all that came out was a belch.

Maria pulled her lips into her mouth and rigidly held them there for a moment, her posture stiff as a board and a blush spreading over her face. Her blue eyes still sparkled as she labored to keep her composure, but her embarrassment was clear.

"Wow, sorry. I, uh, well, root beer y'know? It's got something like ten percent more co2 in it than other sodas. Maybe more, depending on their brewing and canning methods, and any fermentation processes of course..."

He couldn't stop himself. He heard the verbal science diarrhea spewing out of his mouth and almost floated out of his body for a few moments, but he couldn't stop it if he tried.

"You've got some black stuff in your teeth" Maria said, cutting him off none too soon.

Greg grabbed the shiny chrome lid atop the sugar bowl and saw two distinct black globules adhering to both of his incisors. He did his best to look casual as he grabbed a toothpick for swift removal.

"I had Oreos" he said bluntly, unable to think of anything else to add.

He could see she was waiting for him to say something else and he tried like hell to think of something but it did not come. All he could do was smile as he replaced the lid and awkwardly tidied cups and containers on the countertop beside them.

"So you're going to Dr. Whiting's presentation on hazmat safety and second generation disposal methods next week right?" Maria offered, kindly pushing past Greg's not-so-graceful moment.

He could have kissed her for it too. Her almond shaped eyes kept twinkling as if urging him to forget all about it, almost as if somewhere inside her mind she wanted him to know it was nothing to worry about. Greg flashed briefly on his family's belief he might be psychic, and he liked the idea he was picking up messages from her. He liked thinking perhaps they might develop the kind of relationship where they finished each other's sentences and didn't even need to make out Christmas lists on account of their innate understanding of each other's desires.

Then Greg flashed on Nina's lecture about gettting carried away with pedestals and other such things, he grunted slightly from his throat and continued with the business at hand.

"Yeah, since Dr. Whiting is covering so many progressive methods I think Grissom's even going to include it in his notes for my next review which is pretty awesome" he told her with renewed coolness, hitting his brain with a figurative stick each time it tried to relive the previous moments in his head.

"That's great. I almost didn't get a ticket but I got in right at the eleventh hour..." she began, smiling with her eyes as she blew on her coffee.

Greg started to tell her about the last presentation he'd seen by Dr. Whiting when she abruptly cut him off.

"You got your tickets early, didn't you? You and your team?" she inquired in a conversational tone, holding her cup in her hands as she relaxed against the counter.

Her hip was thrust out to her side, the perfectly tailored pinstriped trousers hugging the curve. Greg wasn't staring directly, he only saw it in his peripherals, but he was still distracted by it.

"Uh, yeah. Well, not my whole team. Just the ones who wanted to go. I mean, me and Nick Stokes and...Just me and Nick Stokes actually" Greg managed out, feeling fluttery when he caught the scent of her musky perfume.

"Do you want to get coffee later?" she asked, rather abruptly.

Greg felt like a little surprise party exploded inside his head, but he betrayed no signs of such on his face except for a closed mouth smile of satisfaction.

"Yeah, that'd be great. Wanna do Frank's place after shift? Or better yet, I was actually thinking maybe sometime you and I could head over to the Lamplighter Tavern for some of their famous swordfish-"

"Frank's? You don't actually eat or drink anything over there do you? That place is an E-Coli outbreak waiting to happen!" Maria interrupted, wincing emphatically by scrunching up her freckled nose, and she betrayed no signs of acknowledging Greg's offer of an upscale dinner.

Greg felt more than a little bit kicked in the chest, but he assumed perhaps he had it right in the first place. Coffee was always the best place to start, then came the offer of dinner. Any man worth his salt knew that, and he shouldn't have let Nick Stokes put any other thought in his head. Coffee with Maria Harcourt was all Greg wanted, and coffee was what Greg was going to get.

Just not at Frank's.

"Awe c'mon, Frank's is okay! It's a Friday so the owner's retired showgirl wife is in charge of operations, she plays pretty good old school jazz and makes one hell of a cup of coffee" Greg explained, hoping she might hook into the tone of enthusiasm he injected into his voice and live dangerously.

More wincing on Maria's part, and Greg realized that wasn't going to happen.

"Jaybird's Coffee Lounge across the street has never had even one health code violation, they have over forty flavors now and they have open mic for poet's starting in about two hours. We'll do break together okay? I'll be fun, and clean to boot" she replied, and Greg realized there was no changing her mind.

He wanted to wince at the thought of spoken word poetry being shouted out around him while he tried to have a pre-date date with Maria, and he didn't even want to imagine what other flavors for coffee there could be beyond your basic lattes and cappuccinos. Still, this was what Maria wanted and hence, it became what he wanted too. He had used up most of his daily share of break time already, but he knew there were ways to get around that for a cunning CSI like himself.

"I'm in! If Brass hits me up and I've gotta go out in the field on a case I'll page you, but how about we meet right outside in two hours sharp?" Greg offered, pretending he was in control, pretending he didn't secretly still find it thrilling to talk about working bona fide field cases with decorated members of the LVPD.

"Great, I mean I'd chat here but, you know, the walls have ears. This will be fun, thanks Greg" she said with such radiant excitement Greg thought he finally understood why all of those characters in his English Lit. required reading books were always swooning and sighing.

He was vaguely curious about what she wanted to chat so privately to him about but he had great hopes for it being something intimate regarding him, maybe even something naughty if he was a very lucky man. He was also a little dubious about why she would outright thank him for having coffee with her, but he decided it was best not to make a huge deal out of it. It was the brightest spot in his day by far and he was not going to tarnish it by getting into semantics.

"Alrighty mademoiselle, out front in two hours. And hey, watch your step around those grates! Don't wanna have to take you to Jaybird's on a stretcher" Greg offered, feeling pretty sure he was the smoothest cat on earth.

Maria smiled widely, but a little rigidly.

"Right! I'll uh...I'll see you then Greg. Oh! Before I forget! They're installing new fiber optics up front, the PA system is temporarily down so Judy can't page anyone. She's been looking for you for roundabout an hour, I told her I'd tell you if I saw you. Some kind of package or something I think" Maria offered pleasantly, checking her watch as she began creeping slowly toward the door.

"Sweet" Greg replied from some zero gravity headspace, his brown eyes trained on her with a dopey grin as she made her way out.

"Make sure you watch where you step up there, those electricians are insured to the nines so they toss livewires around like nobody's business. I'll see you later Greg" she finished, giving him a wave as she walked off down the hall.

Greg heard the something-something about Judy Tremont needing him at reception but before he could bother with that he needed to wait for the look-back.

Greg had seen "In The Line Of Fire" about eight-thousand times and one of his favorite scenes was Clint Eastwood sitting on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, eating ice cream, and watching Renee Russo's character walking off. Eastwood's character talks to himself and says that if she looks back at him, it means she's interested. Even though Greg claimed he watched that film strictly for the action plot and he would never admit otherwise to anyone, the 'look-back scene' was always his favorite moment. No matter how many times he saw it, he was always in suspense and he always felt a keen sense of gratification when she did indeed look back at him. He understood how good that felt, and hence he often found himself waiting for the very same thing when it came to girls in his real life.

Greg stood at the threshold of the break room, his eyes planted upon Maria's shapely shoulders and her supermodel legs. He didn't try willing her to turn around with his mind, he didn't want to influence the situation at all, he just waited.

And waited.

And waited.

As Maria approached the final turn around the corridor she stopped momentarily to alert a co-worker to a worrisome rip in the rubber stripping that was supposed to make a particular fume hood airtight. She produced a small notebook from her pocket, scribbled something down, and seemed to revel for a moment in getting stressed out. She said her goodbyes, and headed off again.

Greg zeroed in on the sound of her pretty navy blue heels clacking against the flooring, every step she took filled him with more anticipation. He could almost see her turning in his head, he chewed the tip of his finger as she began clearing the turn. He could swear she was slowing to turn about three times, but before he knew it Greg was staring at an empty space Maria no longer occupied.

She was gone.

Greg blew some air through his plump lips, relaxing his back against the doorjamb as he watched his coworkers buzzing about with their chatter about rumored acquisitions of cutting edge laboratory machinery or which uniformed officer was trying to tell them how to do their jobs that day. He tried latching on to those conversations so that he might begin snapping awake from his romantic musings. So that he might prevent himself from being tempted to construct pedestals when there was work to do.

It wasn't a big deal, really. It was a small thing. Dana Morrison, the catalog model he'd met by the pool at Wynn's his second year in Las Vegas, had not looked back at him and they were together for almost six months. His coffee date had been achieved, so as he made his way toward reception he thought it best to enjoy the present rather than worry about stupid notions he'd gotten from watching a Clint Eastwood movie one too many times.

Once he arrived up front, Greg reached over to Judy's candy tray to celebrate with a nice, fat, red & white melt away mint. He reached eagerly, only to find it empty. Greg narrowed his eyes in the direction of Neil Donovan's reception station for a quick snarl and curse, and then he slapped a smile back on his face as he waited for Judy Tremont to finish her phone call for Chinese food delivery. He started laying out his plan of action in his head; congratulating himself on keeping a fresh, pressed extra sport coat hanging in his locker. It had actually been Warrick Brown's suggestion, but that was so long ago Greg felt it was fair to let the credit pass to him.

"Here you go Mr. Sanders, sorry for the wait. A woman returned this about an hour ago, said you left it at a crime scene. I asked if she wanted to see you personally but she didn't stay" came Judy's sweetheart voice, sliding a Dempsey's bag across the counter in his direction.

Greg thanked her, curious as to what it could be. He wasn't missing anything, and he had purposely been watching where he put things at crime scenes since he'd gotten reamed by Grissom for losing a regulation LVPD vest down a gorge in the desert after he'd taken it off to cool down. He walked the bag into the nearby locker room, sat down, and peered inside.

It was his favorite gray hoodie, the one he had put around the old woman's shoulders when the rookie jerks in PD just left her shivering there in the back of the ambulance in nothing but a thin hospital gown.

And there was a note.


	6. A Thank You & An Apology

_Mr. Sanders,_

_I am writing on behalf of my aunt, Ms. Anika Wilkes. She asked me to return the jacket you were kind enough to loan her. I told her you probably did not expect it back but she insisted. Your gesture gave her much needed comfort in a horrific moment and it is one I don't think she will ever forget. She also asked me to thank you for being so gentle with her dogs, she said you stayed at the house until my brother arrived so the dogs would not have to be taken by animal control. I cannot find the words to explain how much this helped her. Her animals are as precious as children to her and she was relieved there was someone present in that chaos who understood that. _

_She is recovering more and more with every minute that passes, the dogs are doing fine and will be reunited with her very soon. There are no words I can think of to thank you and everyone in the whole police department for all that you've done. We know the statistics, we know how many people never see justice in crimes like these. We are so grateful this animal is off the streets and we thank you for your gift of service to us. Aunt Anika keeps saying she is thanking the lord for sending so many angels to her in her moment of need. You and everyone present that day will always be remembered as angels to us all. Thank you again and bless you. _

_-Sincerely,_

_-Cara Wilkes_

Greg sat upon the locker room bench, reading the note over and over as if he had somehow become trapped inside it. His heart was pounding, the skin on the back of his neck heated. There was a distinct sensation of hope inside him but it mingled so closely with such pure sorrow. He briefly wished the woman's niece had stayed to give it to him in person. Some strange idealism inside him suggested that if he'd just seen her face to face there might have been something he could have said, some bit of information about the upcoming court prosecution he could have shared, to make everything alright. It faded fast, and he understood why she had not stayed.

There was that boundary between victim and investigator which could not be crossed, a boundary that was becoming more distinct to Greg with every case file that passed through his hands. He had watched all of his colleagues struggle with that boundary, including Grissom himself, and he had learned much vicariously through their experiences. Every time a CSI or uniformed officer got too involved, it chipped away at the protective shield around their emotions, their professionalism, and sometimes even their sanity. Personal contact between victim and investigator was to be undertaken carefully by both parties, or else it was just a matter of time before the downward spiral would begin.

Greg held the returned gray hoodie in his hand, the one that was so well broken in it had become like a second skin to him. It looked different to him then, almost as if he'd never seen it before in his life. The strong smell of lavender detergent was so wholly unfamiliar it was almost disorienting, it seemed odd for such a foreign smell to be connected to something of his. He couldn't imagine ever wearing it again, he didn't even like thinking about it in that moment, and with a painful tug of guilt in his chest he stuck it inside his locker - out of sight and out of mind.

Greg tucked the letter into the interior pocket of the sport coat hanging in his locker, placing it behind his beloved mix CD. As he slipped on his lab coat, he took a moment to study his reflection in the little vanity mirror hanging inside the locker door. There it was again; that weird hardness spread across his brow where he was used to seeing bright eyed eagerness. He didn't think he looked older, he couldn't say he thought he looked wiser either. It was something different, something he couldn't quite get his head around no matter how hard he tried. He took a deep breath and was overcome with a strong impulse to just clock the hell out and run off to the shores of Half Moon Bay where everything would be simpler again.

He startled himself with how hard he wound up slamming the door to his locker. The drained feeling when he woke up from restless sleep, the zombie trudge he'd done through his morning. The reprieve in the hallway looking at Maria and the security of touching his past with Nina. The anticipation of an impending first date, the simple joy in considering those possibilities with a beautiful, intelligent girl. The indescribable effects of being told in no uncertain terms he had helped someone, followed by the indescribable grief knowing he could help only after they had been hurt so deeply.

Feeling the seasickness overtake him, he wondered how he was going to manage it if being a CSI meant navigating waters like that all the time.

He dug his phone out of the pocket of his jeans, rapidly flipping through his shortened list of contacts until Sara's name was highlighted. With swift fingers, he composed a text without bothering to censor nor filter himself.

_Ok so I owe you a gold star for insight. Wilkes case is getting to me big time today. Couldn't sleep last night. Talk when you get back? Thanks pally._

He hit send, feeling a knot in his chest growing tighter. He could feel how easy it would be to go tumbling down into those darker feelings, and so he made up his mind to resist via distraction. He pushed it away, down as far as it would go into the metaphorical storage bins in the deepest recesses of his conscious mind. He imagined fleeing down long hallways, locking thick steel doors behind him so he would not see her broken face and he would not hear the frightened whinnies of her pup.

Greg's phone beeped with a new text message. He woke up, wiped the gloss from his eyes and nose, and flipped it open.

_For now, go carpe diem. Don't watch the clock. I'll be there soon chum. -SS_

Greg trembled a little bit when he read it; not in the giddy way he used to when he received messages from Sara, but muscular reflex that came with the instant release of tension. Logically he knew Sara understood, logically he knew they all did because they had all been there. No matter how assured of this he was, there was still nothing like a text message, or a phone call, or a chat over coffee to bring the point home that he was not alone. Carpe Diem was their code for giving one's self permission to stop carrying the weight of the world on their shoulders long enough to breathe. It was a reminder, and Greg heard it loud and clear.

He tucked his phone in jeans pocket, and took a deep breath. He pulled himself back to the tasks in front of him as a civil servant for Clark County, Nevada. Buttoning up his lab coat he started wandering toward the computer room with intention to knock out his ident proficiency intakes, but upon peering through the door he thought it looked just a little too cold in there. He spied the trace lab, a soft smile spreading across his face when he knew it would be much warmer.

There Nina stood, bent over her scope with her shiny tresses secured to the back of her head in a lackadaisical bun with shocks of hair shooting out in wispy fountains. The back of her dark lab coat wrinkled, conspicuous hole in the ankle of her pantyhose, black spots of Sharpie marker dotted over the worn patches on the heels of her patent leather Mary Jane heels.

She had a silver boom box on the counter behind her tuned to an oldies station. The reception was terrible, going from white noise to 'Shake, Rattle, & Roll' by Bill Haley then back to white noise at steady ten-second intervals. Every time the music came through her butt would shimmy back and forth to the beat, but once the white noise was back she stopped immediately. She didn't appear to be doing this with any conscious intent as her attentions were locked down her scope.

Greg watched her for a few moments, laughing to himself when it occurred to him she was like one of those goofy sound activated plastic flowers that had been all the rage in the 90s. He like musing that it was what her soul would look like if it were to materialize on earth.

He almost forgot he was supposed to be mad at her.

Greg looked around for Hodges but he didn't see hide nor hair of him. He could see Hodges workstation had two open cases in play, something cooking up in the GCMS while a large swatch of fabric was curing with chemicals on a timer beneath one of the fume hoods. Nina was working hard to isolate comparison images of fibers under intense magnification, grumbling to herself every time the slide shifted to leave her with blurry photos. Greg caught sight of two untouched boxes of trace from Catherine's case sitting on the counter closest to the entrance. He decided to start there, carefully perusing her notes to find out what he should be looking for.

"Aaahhhh, I gotcha now you bastard" Nina said aloud to no one in particular, grinning with excitement as she daintily depressed the shutter release button on the scope's imaging console with exacting precision.

She pried her eyes away from the scope, great anticipation shone on her heart shaped face as she waited expectantly for the screen beside her to return the still image. The hard drive clicked and clacked, then it delivered a shot one could easily mistake as being a family of fuzzy green dust bunnies floating together in space.

"Oh you evil bitch from hell" groaned Nina, making motions like she wanted to backhand her scope for its insolence.

"Problems there kemosabe?" Greg asked casually, licking his fingers as he flipped through Catherine's detailed instructions.

Nina gasped with a slight screech, slapping her hand over her heart as she whipped around to face him.

"Shit Sanders don't do that to me!" she half reprimanded-half begged, catching her breath with her big hazel eyes almost bulging out of her messy head.

"Don't do that to you? Okay, here's the deal. I'm going to tell you I definitely won't do it, but then maybe tomorrow I will. It's the new thing all the kids are doing, swearing they won't do something and then doing it anyway. It's all the rage right now" he told her sarcastically, sorting through the bindles and baggies in the file box to arrange them by priority.

Nina let out a tension releasing sigh, eyeballing him as she walked past into the hallway to retrieve a few sips of water from the bottle she kept in the all purpose wall mounted bin.

"It was an accident"

"Right"

"I couldn't help myself"

"Sure you couldn't".

Nina took some more sips off her water, wiping away some sweat that had accumulated across her brow beneath the long tendrils of hair hugging either side of her face. She replaced the water in its resting place, biting on her plump bottom lip with a guilty look on her face. She caught Greg's gaze, giving him puppy dog eyes. She tapped her foot and shifted around like she was in pain or had to pee real bad, then she looked sad.

Greg betrayed no emotion on his face, he just stared at her.

"Kiss my ass Sorrensen, it's not gonna work" he told her flat out, turning his back on her as he transported the high priority trace to the open workstation at the back. He smirked only when was sure she couldn't see it.

"Awe Greg, I really am sorry. I wasn't, like, making fun of you or anything. I know I said I wouldn't talk about all that stuff but that was months and months ago. I guess I thought the statute of limitations ran out or something. I wasn't trying to make you look stupid and I don't think I did. I didn't think you'd mind since it was Sara, and honestly, I tell more stories about crap that made me look stupid in college than I do about you. I talk all about your awards and Eagle Scout fundraising stuff too, I talk about all of that. Honestly, I'd never tell anyone anything you specifically told me in confidence. You should know that about me. You big baby"

It was textbook Sorrensen. She'd start out with sweet and truly apologetic tones, then by the middle she'd veer off into justifying herself right before she rambled on into resentment territory. She explained once that her father and brother never had anything much to say when she apologized as a kid, even if they accepted it, so she developed a habit of trying to address as many possible issues they might have as fast as possible before they could walk away from her. Greg had his back to her but envisioned she now had her arms crossed beneath her chest. When he turned to face her, he saw she had not disappointed him.

She looked truly hurt, and if there was any mystery Greg wished to solve it was how Sorrensen had such a knack for making him feel bad when she had done something wrong. He felt a penetrating urge to do something to her, but he wasn't sure what he wanted to do. Grab her, tickle her, shove her in a supply closet and slam the door...he couldn't be sure. He just knew he wanted to do something to her and felt a peculiar sense of frustration inside his body knowing he couldn't.

"I love it when you sweet talk me" he said with melodramatic sentiment, unable to stop himself from trying to provoke her even further if he could.

Nina rolled her eyes, then she dropped down on her stool and rolled back over to her scope. As if suddenly possessed with magic fingers, she made a few swift motions to stabilize the slides in her scope, magnify them with a new set of light frequencies, and then she snapped a near perfect comparison photograph. She whipped her head to face him with a wicked, obstinate glare.

"I didn't mean to embarrass you and I'm sorry. If you want to be an uptight prick nose about it, you go ahead. I've learned how to give an apology and I've given you not one but two of them today. Call me when someone teaches you how to accept one gracefully" she said succinctly, turning her back on him to await the photo printer to produce her image for the case file on her workstation.

Greg grinned from ear to ear, satisfied at last with her words. He crept off to the farthest corner of the trace lab, sliding his phone out from his pocket without a sound. He muffled the speaker with his hand, flipping through his contact list to put out a quick call.

Within a few seconds, Nina's phone went off with her favorite ringtone of Gremlin laughter from the popular movie. She whipped it out of her lab coat and flipped it open with swiftness.

"Sorrensen" she said in her professional voice.

"Sanders here, I'm calling to gracefully accept your apology" he said, watching her intently.

She began to speak into the phone, then she made moves to turn around. He kept the phone to his ear, then he wiggled his eyebrows at her with a smirk. Nina pressed her lips together in effort to twist out of a smile, but in the end she could not do it. Her face softened, and she slapped her phone shut.

"You dork" she said.


	7. Intrigues In Trace

"So where the hell is our friend Hodges anyway?" Greg inquired, carefully resealing a trace sample of cat litter stained with blood so he could knock it over to Wendy, the new DNA tech.

"I dunno. I'd say either making copies of his 'Doctor Jupiter' episode guide on the Xerox machine upstairs or lurking around Grissom's office waiting for attention, one or the other" she said with little interest, jotting down her comparison findings with a pen that had a bulbous green frog head on the top.

"You don't sound too happy, did you two have a falling out? Don't tell me the love affair is over?" Greg quipped, dropping his baggie into the requisite box for later transport.

"Egh, yeah kinda. He's mad at me" Nina shrugged, letting loose a very satisfied smile as she finished up and tossed the file into the pick-up tray by the door.

"Uh-oh. You didn't mention his many failures to make it on 'Jeopardy', did you? He hates that" asked Greg, laughing quietly as he recalled the last time he'd done that very thing himself.

"Nah, I just said I always thought 'Three's Company' was stupid. He got that look, you know that Hodges look of ultimate disgust? He got it and he launched into this speech about how it was a simpler time back then. How that show is a cornerstone of, and I quote, _nostalgic comfort_ for a large percentage of people in this country, and a million other reasons I was wrong. Seriously, last month I said I thought his mom sounded a little overbearing and he wasn't even an eighth as pissed off" Nina explained with slightly mournful tones, bulging out her eyes a little to show her exasperation.

"I don't know how the hell you work with that guy day in, day out in here. I can't believe you didn't go for the DNA spot when it opened again" Greg told her, shaking his head in disbelief.

"Meh, you know I've never been big on biochem. It's just bodily fluid after bodily fluid in there. I like all the mystery chunks of things and flecks of who knows what until I do my magic and tell 'em. I mean, the job security and bennies would've been nice but blood and secretions don't float my boat Sanders. If it was genetic research and stuff that would be different, but here it's usually your standard markers and anomalies, just check the common alleles and you're done, y'know? Trace analysis is sooooo much better, it's like a treasure hunt up in here every day" explained Nina, her eyes sparkling a little as she leafed through the samples in Greg's box, looking upon them as if each one were a precious stone.

She disappeared inside her own head for a moment, furrowed her eyebrows at something she found, and then the blood drained from her face a little.

"Not saying I think what you did in there was beneath me or something. Please, please don't take it that way. I just meant..."

Greg smiled at her as she rambled in defense of herself without bothering to be accused of anything first. He did the very same thing with her from time to time; a remnant of past rivalries and the effects those rivalries had on their relationship in the past. Since she'd returned to his post-Stanford life there had been a lot of self-consciousness between them about that particular dynamic.

When it came to things like video games, air-hockey, softball, or who could master control of the newest gadget in the lab first; their respective competitive streaks would never die. From the very first moment they met there had been an almost instinctive drive to outdo one another, and Greg actually couldn't stand the thought of it ever vanishing completely. In their younger years they had both been trying so hard to prove themselves they developed bad habits of mowing each other down in the process, but now they made a joint endeavor to grow up and be supportive even if they enjoyed friendly competition.

Still, there was that shared memory of past hurts and frustrations, so there had been a lot of qualifiers slipping into their conversations. Qualifiers like "I don't think I'm better than you because I..." or "I hope you know I didn't mean...", and many more. Greg hoped that would wear off in time once whatever was left of old wounds finally healed completely.

He listened to Nina chortle on, pointing out how she knew a person had to have particularly sharp mental powers to absorb all the advanced memorization involved in hardcore biochemistry, how she really did think biochem was like the intricate filigree icing atop the organic chemistry cake. She was trying so hard to assure him she was aware of how smart he was and how much she was definitely okay with that.

All because she'd said she didn't want his old job.

Greg screwed his eyes shut tight to keep from laughing out loud, then he reached out with his gloved hand to pat the top of her similarly gloved hand.

"Sorrensen..." he said, trying to interject.

"...Y'know? I mean, I didn't even plan on working in a crime lab anyway and I think I just feel more comfortable in trace. I could probably handle DNA if I really wanted to but I don't know if I'd really want to and..."

She just kept going and going, to the point Greg thought it might be a good idea to reach for the fire extinguisher just in case smoke started spilling out of her ears.

Greg stifled some more laughter, and regained his composure.

"Short round!" he called, firmly but congenially.

Her throaty singsong voice stopped rambling immediately, with excess breath escaping from her chest in a muted little huff.

"Huh?" she asked with interest, unfazed by her own marathon chatter.

"It's okay, I know what you're sayin'. The polymerase chain reaction really curls my toes but you need a big hunkin' mass selective detector to really put the shine on _your_ nickel" related Greg, puffing out his lips in a wide smirk as he nodded with his eyes closed, silently mouthing the words "Ohhh yeah".

Nina was pleased, a fact made plain when she released one of her hallmark giggles. She played right into his innuendo, mimicking his nodding actions with an even bigger smirk.

"Straight up" she responded, very satisfied and maybe even a little bit impressed. She rolled her chair over to Grimmis, the most loved and respected GC-MS in the Las Vegas crime lab, and shot Greg a look like she just knew she was the smoothest cat ever to prowl the planet. Then she tapped the tip of her finger to the tip of her tongue, pressed that finger against Grimmis' digital information screen, and made a hissing noise through her teeth.

Then she nodded once more, wiggled her eyebrows, and beamed with a smile.

Greg laughed out loud again, feeling he was laughing right down to his core. He took a moment to seize that feeling, remembering Sara's message to him, and he didn't let his eyes wander anywhere near the clock. He savored the warm, nostalgic sensation he got playing mad scientist with his friend. Mixing, matching, taking apart and putting back together in the lab just like they had done almost every day for four years at Stanford, and he kept telling himself that everything really was okay.

Then he moved on to more pressing topics.

"Serious though, think Alicia's any closer to a bouncing bambino? I think Ecklie's looking to shed temps like crazy. He's been shutting up about using too much ballistics gel but now he's complaining about the temps costing too much instead. I mean, has Alicia said anything more about leaving?" Greg asked, choosing his words carefully in hopes he would not worry her too much.

"She's still trying, but I really don't know. I've heard Ecklie chewing on Grissom about me, and Jake Barnes in fingerprints. I swear he's even out to get poor Neil. I _think_ I'm safe for now though, Nicky had a talk with both of them for me, kinda bigged me up and said I was an asset, all that. It was a little bit of awesome" she recalled, her cherubic eyes returning from wherever they had been hiding as she re-gloved and dumped her surplus solvents.

Greg's ears grew a little warm hearing her say 'Nicky' again, and when she said it then it sounded even more intimate than the first time. It gave him a strange sensation of mild paranoia, similar to how he felt on those rare occasions the phone would ring a few times in the middle of the night but stop before he could pick up. Logically he knew it should be nothing, but inside himself there lingered an itchy little fear something bad might happen.

He wasn't exactly sure what to do about it. He wasn't sure if he even really needed to do anything about it. His curiosity was piqued though, even more than when whispers started in the hallways that there might be more between Gil Grissom and Sara Sidle than it might seem. Warrick Brown had already bucked the trend and taken a wife, Greg couldn't help but wonder if it had gotten Nick thinking about doing the same. Last he knew, Nina was still on her self-imposed 'men diet' and not looking to date until her debts were paid off, until she was back on solid ground, until she could get past the wounds inflicted by her lying, cheating, thieving former spouse.

He asked himself if any of these things would really have an impact on his every day life anyway. Warrick was married but he was just as brilliant a CSI as he ever was, he didn't suddenly start leaving slack for anyone else to pick up and he hadn't gotten so absorbed by his relationship he didn't still find time to play sports or hang out with everyone. He told himself that even if Nina was dating Nick, or even if Nick wanted to marry Nina, it had nothing to do with him. Greg made a conscious decision there just wasn't anything in the equation that he needed to be concerned about.

Then he opened his mouth to speak.

"You crushin'?"

He hadn't meant to say that. He gave a wince that lasted but a millisecond, then he decided he might as well just see what happened. He kept his head down in concentration as he dissected a burnt piece of corkboard in search of accelerants, then without moving his head he peered up at her beneath raised brows to gauge her reaction.

She got that look on her face. The one that started out like she had a genuine lack of understanding of what he could mean, but melted into a sneaky little sparkle of guilt once their eyes had been locked for a couple of seconds. It was the same face she made in junior year when he asked if she knew anything about the group of mystery streakers who had run through the quad outside their favorite library wearing nothing but cardboard smiley face masks.

"Whatcha mean?" she responded, in a really bad impersonation of confusion.

Greg stopped what he was doing, sat up straight, and stared her right down.

"Don't gimme that. Nina girl's crushin' big time" he teased, coaxing her to confess with his big brown eyes.

"Who you been talking to? You been talking to Wendy?" Nina asked, biting her bottom lip as she averted her gaze to Catherine's boxes of trace.

"Maybe" Greg bluffed, dropping the sample of charred cork into its waiting tube before dropping it down in the centrifuge.

Nina stood smirking as she grabbed the unsorted box of trace and brought it to the large aluminum cart on the other side of the entrance. She began pulling bindles out, then she looked over at Greg, head cocked to one side, and examined his face with her inquisitive hazel eyes.

Then she looked smug.

"_Wendy didn't tell you ann-nee-thing_" she announced brazenly; giggling quietly.

Greg was off his seat then, eagerly shuffling over to the sorting table, great intention on his face. He stood right beside her, purposely invading her personal space to the point he was practically breathing down her neck, and then he poked her in the side with a gloved finger.

"Get outta here, fool" she protested, ignoring him as best she could as she attempted to read the smeared label upon a baggie filled with pulverized glass fragments.

"Come on, tell me things" pushed Greg, taking advantage of his height by hovering directly over her any time she tried to move.

"Will you quit? Crunch time Sanders, shift's almost over, come on" she half begged, half whined, failing at her attempts to elbow him in the ribs as he was very quick on the dodge.

Greg egged her on a little bit longer by blocking access to her work station and snatching the claw clip that held her messy bun in place, but it just served to push her into increasing annoyance rather than inducing her to fess up.

"Dude, you're being ridiculous. Gimme my thingy" complained Nina in subdued tones, her long hair falling down to her waist on either side in disheveled waves.

Greg held the clip in his hand, tucking it behind his elbow as he crossed his arms over his stomach.

"Why won't you tell me?" he asked honestly, leaning his weight back on the counter behind him as she approached.

"Tell you what?" she asked in an innocent, soothing sort of voice which Greg found to be just a little bit hypnotizing.

She stared up at him for a few seconds, the gold flecks in her eyes glimmering. She dug her hand down to retrieve her hair clip, and Greg found he could do nothing but give in and let her. Once she had it, she backed away with a smile teasing at the corners of her mouth, winding her hair into a rope before sweeping it up into an even messier bun than before. She didn't look away from him once.

Greg caught his breath.

"Tell me what you told Wendy" he said, his voice coming out deeper than it usually did.

The stare down continued for three seconds that felt to Greg like eons, then a voice came loudly from his left side.

"Wendy? Wendy Simms? Was she in here?"

Greg remained trapped in the staring contest for just a few moments more. When he finally remembered how, he turned his head in slow motion toward the entrance to the trace lab.

It was Hodges.


	8. Secrets & Trolls

"No, Wendy Simms was _not_ in here. Nice binders, this mean we're getting another volume of Leonard Nimoy's favorite recipes for Christmas?" Greg cracked, sarcasm lurking under his bored tone of voice.

Hodges held his stack of booklets to his chest, giving Greg the stink eye as if by sheer reflex.

"No, as a matter of fact these are episode guides for the most underrated science fiction series in history, complete with glossy eight-by-ten reproduction of the original cast photo from 1985. They're a surprise for my Saturday fantasy league" Hodges candidly informed him, like he thought Greg was a moron for not understanding something so patently obvious.

"Sounds fascinating" Greg replied in monotone, turning his attention back to Nina and the bundles of trace sitting upon the sorting table, almost immediately.

"Fascinating for those who can appreciate it, yes. Did you know Doctor Jupiter was one of the first series subject to massive write-in campaigns that-"

Whatever else Hodges had to say about Doctor Jupiter became lost to the world as he stared around the room, his face like that of a parent who has just realized their child dripped ice cream all over the interior of the new car.

"What did you do to my lab?" he asked, dropping his binders on the all-purpose counter before rushing to check his workstation.

Greg opened his mouth to let out another smart-ass remark but once he saw Hodges nervously examining his spectroscope like it was a victim at a crime scene, he rolled his eyes and dismissed it with a shake of his head. He took a spot across from Nina at the sorting table, dividing the passing seconds between snagging bindles marked 'RUSH' and stealing glances at Nina's face.

She seemed to have forgotten all about him.

"Secret keeper" he accused her quietly, making faces that were reminiscent of a teenager being told to lower the volume on the stereo.

She opened her mouth to reply, but Hodges got there first.

"Sorrensen, a word? How many cases do you have open right now?" he barked, one hand placed squarely on his hip while the other rubbed at his temple.

"Officially? None. I finished out the two overflow cases from swing and now I'm starting on some of Ms. Willows stuff. It's cool Sensei Hodges" Nina told him, her tone cool and reassuring.

"I told you about Maria" Greg pointed out to her, dropping the bindles in his hands and heading back over to the centrifuge once he heard the timer go off.

Nina looked hurt by that, and once again she opened her mouth only to be cut off by Hodges.

"Did orientation mean nothing to you? There are _three_ separate file trays over here for a reason. That reason being there are _three_ different shifts in this crime lab, you see where I'm going with this? It would help me, and everyone in the lab, if you'd just put the swing cases in the tray marked '_swing_' so everyone knows where to find what they need, m'kay?" lectured Hodges, like he was endeavoring to sound patient and kind but having a really hard time with it.

Nina furrowed her dark eyebrows and regarded him like he was an escaped mental patient, though her demeanor remained easygoing.

"_No one cares_. They never find it themselves when they come in here, they always ask one of us to find it even if it's right there in front of them, you _know_ that. It could be hanging from the ceiling with the case number blazing to the skies in neon lights and they'd _still_ ask one of us where the hell their file is" she pointed out, very tiredly, as she walked over to Greg.

"Systems are in place because those systems work. Just because certain people might disregard those systems doesn't mean we should abandon ourselves to chaos my young padawan" Hodges told her, though he might as well have been talking to himself.

"I'm not keeping secrets Greg, really I'm not. It's just one of those things where it was a matter of _finding the right time_ to tell you. It's not that I wasn't going to tell you at _all_" Nina told Greg, trying to catch his gaze as he swiftly dropped the prepared test samples into the GC-MS.

Greg punched in the numbers for the required sequencing run, letting it all sink in as he pushed 'START'. He didn't feel pissed off as much as let down, feeling like he told her everything while she had obviously been holding back. He couldn't form an answer straight away, so he headed back over to the sorting table.

Nina followed right behind.

"You could've told me" Greg said, sighing as he realized there were even more bindles of evidence tucked beneath a couple of manila envelopes in Catherine's box.

"Told you what?" asked Hodges, then he turned to Nina.

"Told him what? Did Wendy say something about me? What did she say?" Hodges threw in hastily, tightening his jaw as he spotted Greg haphazardly throwing the new bags of evidence in with the already sorted ones.

He pulled the box out of Greg's hands and sighed with discontent.

"_Nothing Hodges_. This is not about Wendy, and not about you" Greg informed him, throwing Hodges a very tight smile.

"I didn't know how you'd take it" Nina said, almost whispering, lazily sliding a small jar of unidentified liquid toward the collection she was aiming to process herself.

"Right" Greg replied, giving a nod, followed by a shrug, followed by another nod.

"Come on, there are plenty of things you don't talk to me about but I don't push. I figure you'll tell me when you're ready" defended Nina, her tone staying casual as she seemed painfully aware of the presence of Hodges.

Greg opened his mouth to speak but then he caught sight of Hodges standing there gawking at both of them like they were a live version of The Jerry Springer Show. Greg stared at him a little, then with a jerk of his head he told Nina to follow him to a more private corner.

"What? What don't I talk about?" he asked in a whisper, working hard not to get outright irritated though the notion was certainly building inside him.

"You did _not_ tell me anything about Maria, I had to figure that out myself. I figured you had reasons for not sharing with me, but seriously, I didn't know if it was because you just clam up about that stuff with everybody these days or if you just don't feel like you can open up to _me_..." she said, looking him straight in the eyes to let him see how serious she was.

Greg felt his blood pressure spike for a second, hairs prickling the back of his neck when he thought about how unfair that was. Maria was new to the lab, Maria wasn't anyone's close friend or team mate so it didn't matter. What mattered was Nina Sorrensen seeing Nick Stokes and neither of them had said a word. Greg was going to tell her just that.

Just as soon as she was finished.

"And Greg, that case. That case last week, the one in the desert. You've just..." she began, peering over at Hodges as if to make doubly sure he was not listening in.

"You've just been so..._off_ since that call out, but I didn't want to push, y'know? I didn't take it personally, but you know what? I've been wishing you'd bring it up, I've really wished you'd talk to me because honestly..."

She trailed off for a moment, looking at the floor as if expecting to find the words she needed stenciled into the tiles. She bit her plump bottom lip, took a breath, then looked him in the eye.

"I've been worried about you dodo" she finished; her voice mild, her concern once again flitting across her face unabashedly.

Greg stared at her for a moment, and in that moment he couldn't have remembered any of the reasons he had for not talking to her about the Wilkes case. It never occurred to him that anyone but Sara, and occasionally Sophia Curtis, ever paid enough attention to him to really pick up on it when he was troubled. As he looked at Nina with her natural hair and light make-up, it occurred to him that adult face of hers was still relatively new to him.

When he remembered her with her mane of dyed plum colored hair or her short cut of electric blue curls, when he remembered how her face looked with her loud make-up and piercings, he also instantly remembered how often she really did look out for him back in the day. How all the guys would kick him around for showing any sign of sensitivity, and how it was so often Sorrensen that dragged him off to a quiet corner to talk things out.

He realized that he should have known her better.

He wondered what her reasons had been for not telling him about Nick, though he might have guessed they were similar to the reasons Sara tended to keep mum about her feelings concerning Grissom.

He could vaguely remember all the cautiousness and tentativeness that came at the beginnings of real romantic relationships. The excitement of learning all about a new someone special, the sneaking around, the secret liaisons, the build-up to that moment when it was finally time to tell the world. He could remember, if he dug hard enough into his memory that is.

As he imagined a burgeoning romance between Nina and Nick, he felt a large pocket of emptiness make itself known near his heart. He felt envious, and he felt more than a little bit jealous to boot. Just like he felt jealous of what Sara seemed to feel for Grissom, just like he felt jealous of Warrick's marriage even though he hassled him for it all the time. He still wasn't sure he was ready for what those guys had going, but he knew there were many elements he wished to have himself.

Someday.

"Greg?" came Nina's voice from outside his head.

Only thirty seconds or so had passed, but Greg had about an hour's worth of stuff bouncing around his brain.

"Yeah? No, I know what you're saying. I mean..." he responded weakly, wishing he had the same knack for expressing his own thoughts as he had for taking other people's thoughts and bouncing those thoughts back to them.

He wanted to tell her a whole hell of a lot of things all of a sudden, and it figured that he would want this right in the middle of a work day. He thought he'd just smooth things over with another apology until they could really chat, but before he could do so there came yet another interruption from Hodges.

"What the _hell_ is that?" graveyard's principle trace tech called out in alarm, flinging something back into the file box with great force before recoiling slightly from the table.

Without so much as a blink of an eye, Greg and Nina exchanged conspiratorial glances with eyebrows cocked. They grinned at one another, and made their way over with shared curiosity.

Greg got there first, peering down into the box with expectations it might be Grissom's missing tarantula or at least some kind of cool fungus. Greg darted his eyes over every item in front of him but nothing in particular caught his attention. It was Nina who spotted the offending item, retrieving a plastic baggy containing a filthy, naked, rubbery little troll doll whose skin was so discolored from age it looked like it could have been carved out of earwax. It had one beady brown eye but the other eye was missing, and atop its head was a tuft of frizzy synthetic black hair matted with lint and debris.

"_This?_" Nina confirmed.

"Nnnh-nnnh" Hodges replied, the disgust on his face increasing as he stared at it.

"It's okay David, these are nice. You rub their hair for good luck" Nina informed him in a chipper voice.

She held it out for Hodges to examine but the closer she got to him, the farther back he pulled away.

"Get...that thing...away from me. I'm _not_ processing that" Hodges winced, his face taking on a distinct shade of pale.

Nina glanced at Greg, amusement mixed with confusion.

"It's an inanimate object Hodges, it can't hurt you" added Greg in a way that made it apparent he thought the man might seriously doubt the validity of his statement.

"You don't know that for sure, it looks diseased. It's _hideous_"

Hodges looked sweaty, and he pulled at the collar of his shirt uncomfortably.

Greg encouraged Nina to hold the bag closer to Hodges but she already had that guilty look on her face, the one that alerted Greg her conscience was kicking in.

"Look, I'm putting it away" she said, slipping it back beneath the manila envelopes, "I'll process it when you're on break, okay?"

Greg rolled his eyes, but Hodges seemed to calm down.

"Appreciated. And you might wanna double glove. What the hell would Catherine bag that for anyway?" Hodges asked them, still wincing a little bit as he went back to sorting.

Greg smirked.

"He's her number one suspect" he said dryly.

Nina's laughter hit the ceiling but the face of Hodges illuminated with snotty indignation.

"Is there any chance you have somewhere else to be? Any chance at all?"

Greg's eyes instinctively darted to the clock on the wall and those eyes almost popped out of his skull when he saw the time. He remembered he certainly did have somewhere else to be, and he was ten minutes late already.

"Oh shit! I gotta get outta here" Greg announced, more to himself than anyone else, spinning around wildly to figure out what he had to take care of before he could walk out the door.

"What's the hurry? You need to take a ride in the Mystery Machine with Scooby and the rest of the gang there Shaggy?" Hodges cracked, laughing to himself as he walked over to tend his evidence under the fume hood.

Greg stopped just briefly to eye him, then he set to work clearing his work area and signing off the chain of evidence sheets. The sample he'd tossed into the GC-MS had a full twenty minutes to go, which meant he'd either have to rush through his coffee break with Maria or find someone else to take custody.

"Neens, c'mere, you gotta take this" he pleaded, pulling her over to show her just what he was talking about.

"I got it, I got it..." she assured him with coolness, appearing very entertained by his harried behavior.

"Where ya goin'?" she threw in, smiling sweetly as she awaited his answer.

"Coffee, for coffee. With Maria" he told her, snapping off his gloves and fixing his hair in the reflection of the glass.

"Superfly! You went for it?" Nina confirmed excitedly, taking liberty to slip his lab coat off of him and brush some lint from the shoulders of his brown button down shirt.

Greg almost told her it had been the other way around, that Maria had asked him out in the end. He was still one-hundred percent certain he would have done the asking in the break room had Maria not beaten him to it, so really the issue of who asked who was irrelevant.

"Yeah, the girl was putty in my hands" he said with conviction, turning his attention away from Nina just in case she started looking right through him again.

"Okay, I'm never gonna get on you about women anymore Sanders. You _are_ the man" Nina told him with conviction, quite the joyful little creature as she held out Greg's lab coat.

Greg gave her his patented 'awe shucks' look.

"I try" he said modestly.

He fell into her eyes again for a few seconds more, and still wanted to talk to her but he couldn't deal with it just then. He still had breath mints to eat, hair to fix, and a sport coat to grab.

"Gotta run" He said quickly, slapping his hands together with energy. He took his coat from Nina, popped her on the nose gently with his finger, turned on his heels with a grin, and headed toward the door.

Then he looked back.

"I'll see _you_ later" Greg said to Nina, pointing directly at her with a peacemaking sort of smile.

"Later" Nina replied, her cherubic eyes all aglow as she set back to work with a wave in his direction.

Greg stiffened as he regarded her co-worker.

"Hodges" He said in a monotone, narrowing his eyes at him with dramatic flare as he made his final exit.


	9. Over Coffee

Jaybird's Coffee Lounge was pretty much a carbon copy of every other coffee joint that was popular in Las Vegas in 2005. Brick walls adorned with vintage advertising memorabilia in distressed frames, tall tables with round mosaic tops surrounded by equally tall padded stools, pendant lamps that looked like pearls hanging from black cords, and a pristinely kept refrigerated display case chock-a-block with fancy cheesecakes and all manner of European pastries. It was Greg's first visit there but he felt he could have been in it a thousand times before. The only difference between Jaybird's place and every other java joint in town was the angry hippie chick shouting feminist poetry over a microphone at half past midnight.

"I accepted your manhood and worshipped at its temple!" she called out to the audience, looking like a modern, more sleek and streamlined version of 1970s era Cher, "I sacrificed the goddess inside me, I let her wither under the burden of your ego! I ate of your seeds but in return you killed my flower!"

Greg cupped his hand over his mouth, fearing the woman onstage might come tear his own manhood off if she caught sight of him laughing. He turned to Maria, expecting to see her in a similar state of amusement. He was a little bit surprised to see her watching the poetess like some people watched films of MLK's speeches.

Maria sipped her fat-free organic soy latte, tucking some of her blonde curls behind her ear as she leaned in to whisper.

"She's amazing, isn't she?" she asked, her voice ripe with awe.

Greg pulled his lips into his teeth and bit down on them for a moment to steady his face. Once he had composure, he cleared his throat and answered her.

"She can really paint a picture in your head" he said, leaving out the fact he was not exactly fond of the aforementioned picture.

Maria seemed pleased upon hearing his response, and that was good enough for Greg. He tried really getting into the poets and their compositions but in the fifteen minutes he had been there listening, Greg felt like his life force was getting sucked away with every dramatic syllable. Still, he wasn't sure if he had some innate distaste for all modern poetry in general, or just modern poetry that sucked.

He preferred watching Maria's reactions to the poetry reader rather than watching the reader herself. There seemed to be a lot going on behind her baby blues, Greg liked how she cocked her head to the side as she listened with such attentiveness. Greg tuned out the sounds of the angry poet, and tuned into Maria's loveliness. He sipped his iced vanilla Chai latte, the dopey grin returning to his face as he rested his chin upon the palm of his free hand, happily observing her clap her sinewy hands at the conclusion of fashion doll Cher's ranting performance.

Maria finally looked over at him, and without even thinking about it he found himself winking at her.

She froze in place for a moment, offered him a weak smile, averted her blue eyes to the plate of almond biscotti upon the table, and focused her attention on munching one. Greg wasn't phased in the least, he just took the opportunity to slide the plate closer to her for her convenience.

She cleared her throat.

"Did you know this building is one of the oldest in Las Vegas? Apparently it used to be an Italian restaurant that was a front for some gangsters, Joey...Fats or something like that. The manager told me they pulled something like fifteen bricks with bullet holes out of the kitchen wall when they did the renovations. Can you imagine?" conversed Maria, dunking her cookie and blowing on it before taking a ginger bite with napkin held beneath her chin.

Greg perked up immediately.

"This used to be La Bella Prato? I read all about it in a couple of articles I dug up at the university library but I never tracked down the actual address. It was Joey 'Fatso' Fagan who owned it. They used to serve the worst food because the chef was just somebody's cousin brought in to keep up appearances, but it was all money laundering. Funniest thing is they actually got a lot of customer cash running through here. Not because of the food but because they had this accordion player who made all the girls cry with his songs from the old country" Greg informed her, his face lively as his brown eyes began darting all around the room like those of a child inside a massive toy store.

Maria chewed her cookie, smiling as she nodded her head up and down in the manner of a stiff windshield wiper. She looked around the room herself, and at first Greg thought she might be imagining what the place looked like way back when. Upon closer inspection, she actually looked a lot like someone seeking out a better place to sit.

"That's...interesting" she told him, rubbing her fingertips together to get the crumbs off.

"Do you know what they did with the bricks? Is there a display case somewhere in here or did they give them to the new museum over at the Palace Grand Ballroom?" Greg asked with vigor, looking around as if to spot them.

"They threw them away" Maria told him flatly.

Greg was shocked.

"Are you kidding? That was Vegas history" he said, all astonishment.

"Yeah, criminal history the owners don't want to be associated with. Not to mention those old bricks made the place very structurally unsound" Maria informed him, laughing as if she thought Greg must have been kidding the entire time.

Greg felt something akin to nausea go tumbling through his stomach, his posture deflating like a balloon when he thought of how much her inflection reminded him of Neil Donovan's when he'd dismissed the importance of the stolen family heirlooms at the start of shift.

"Well yeah, I mean I can understand wanting to distance yourself from criminal history, but don't you ever hate how Las Vegas history just gets blown up all the time? Don't you think it's cool when you see the old places they haven't torn down? I don't know, it's like a retired war veteran in a nursing home, he might not be as young as he used to be but he's got stories" Greg offered, his honesty in that moment almost catching him off guard.

"Oh, I like a good story. Forget it, I love a good story. Problem is, we're in the business of fighting crime and I'm in the business of reducing risk. Old buildings are prime real estate for drug dealers and sex workers, you know that. If that property gets cleared off and maintained by someone who keeps it operational and secure, the criminal element shies away. That in turn reduces both crime and risk. You know that's true. The crime rate is so bad here as it is, I just see those old motels out on Boulder and I just feel sad, and then scared. Maybe they were nice once but they're not anymore, and really Greg, a _building _isn't the same as a _person._ A building can't really tell a story" Maria informed him, her voice was still girlish and her words were as pointed as ever but Greg didn't feel as impressed by it in that moment.

Where Greg's insides had felt all warm and liquidy when he'd first walked in with her, they now started to feel like they were growing a little cold.

"I think they can. They tell _me_ stories anyway" he said without fanfare.

"Does Mr. Grissom know you hear buildings talking to you?" Maria cracked, laughing at her own joke.

Greg opened his mouth like he was going to respond, but nothing came out. He forced out a peculiar sounding burst of a laugh, an exploding 'Ha!' devoid of mirth. He felt a creepy, crawly sensation start working its way around his shoulder blades but he purposely chose to ignore it. They had been having coffee for twenty minutes, which meant the buffer of first date awkwardness would soon be passed. He told himself he had nothing to worry about.

"You're probably wondering why I asked you here" Maria said, pulling her stool closer to the table and leaning forward.

Greg thought this was more like it.

"Well, I think I have a pretty good idea" Greg replied, dropping his shaggy head to the side a little, injecting his voice with the velvety tones that always worked wonders on the ladies.

A megawatt smile came over Maria's face and Greg was amazed anyone could get their teeth as white as hers. She let her shoulder fall toward the table a little as if it had gone weak, staring up at the ceiling as her cheeks flushed a little pink. She let out a girlish whine mixed with a laugh, and Greg's heart skipped a beat.

"Am I that obvious?" Maria asked, sapphire eyes growing more glittery with each passing second.

"Maybe, but last I checked being obvious isn't a crime so you're in luck" he answered, his powers of charm coming out in full force.

He thought about reaching over to hold her hand but stopped himself just in time. He knew this was no time to lose his cool, not when he was so close to her. He wanted to touch her in the worst way, but the last thing he wanted to do was come off too aggressive. Even more than that, he definitely didn't want to come off too much like a horny guy who'd been so busy with his new job he hadn't gotten laid in over three months. He held it together, his senses piqued for any cues from her that would open the door for a touch.

"So you're not going to take me away in cuffs?" she confirmed playfully.

Greg's mind flooded with a visual of what she'd just suggested, just him leading her across the street in LVPD regulation handcuffs. Then his mind flooded with the visual of fuzzy cuffs in a bedroom complete with ironwork headboard. His body was growing increasingly warm, and hence he sucked back greedily on his icy drink in an effort to chill out like he'd never chilled out before. His inner warden told him to be cool, and he obeyed.

At least, he tried.

"No, no cuffs for you. Negative on the cuffy-cuffs" he said, his voice cracking only slightly as he felt his inner warden kicking the crap out of his skull.

He used every ounce of caloric energy in his body to keep from squirming in his seat.

"I've been wanting to talk to you all week but like I said, the walls have ears in that lab and I'm new, the last thing I want is to get some kind of reputation as office flirt or man chaser or something. You know what I mean, yes?" Maria asked hopefully, taking a dainty sip from her mug.

He did know what she meant. Back when he worked full time in the lab, he couldn't so much as wink at a new female tech without everyone spreading rumors he'd already broken her heart or tried to convince her to go through one of the drive through chapels with him. He couldn't stand how the people in the lab would take one little bit of vague information and blow it up into some seedy, dramatic tale. He didn't blame Maria in the least for keeping quiet, and he thought it did her credit that she was so careful.

"Yeah, well you know how it is on the job. I bet even people who work at The Pentagon on top secret espionage get bored after awhile and start making stuff up about their co-workers to pass the time" Greg offered congenially, talking just to talk so Maria would have another chance to tell him whatever it is she wanted to tell him.

The anticipation was killing him.

"Exactly. You've been so great since I started, I really appreciate all you've done to help me settle in. You're really easy to talk to" she told him graciously, then she gently touched the top of his hand with her fingertips.

"Hey, you're welcome, I know what it's like to be the new guy" he explained, growing woozier by the millisecond.

He thought it could have a lot to do with his raging ice cream headache from drinking the cold Chai so fast as well as the fact said drink was loaded with a ton of refined sugar, but he knew it was mostly Maria.

Maybe she'd never get into Las Vegas crime history with him, but then again maybe she just needed a little time to warm up to it. Maybe she didn't have the best sense of humor on the planet but that was overrated anyway. Maybe she was a little bit uptight but really, Greg thought that could be kind of cute on the right girl. Besides, how could he even think of turning away from such a gorgeous female who was obviously so into him. It was the kind of thing only stupid men did, and Greg Sanders was not a stupid man.

"I don't want to be too forward, and you can say no, but I was wondering if I could ask a favor?" said Maria, looking like an Abercrombie & Fitch model come to life right before Greg's very eyes.

"Anything" Greg replied, swiftly and true.

"You know Dr. Whiting's presentation? As far as I know, no one else in the lab is going except you, me, and Nick. Since it's going to be a function off site, I just thought it would be the perfect chance for some personal face time. My seat is up in the balcony somewhere though, so I was thinking about maybe negotiating a little ticket exchange? If that would be okay with you?" Maria proposed, her face even more flushed, this time with what was clearly anticipation.

Greg's mind went wild with possibilities. He knew Nick wouldn't shirk at changing his ticket with Maria's as long as Greg compensated him. The presentation would be concluded by ten that evening, leaving plenty of time for wining and dining. Maybe even some dancing at The Palace Grand Ballroom if he could get them to the downstairs lounge in time and padded his wallet with enough money to bribe the bouncers for admission.

It was the most perfect idea in the world.

"Yeah, that'd be fine. That'd be great actually. I'll talk to Nick" Greg told her, grinning from ear to ear.

Maria looked overjoyed, then it turned quickly into concern.

"You won't tell him it was my idea, right? I thought maybe you could say you traded your ticket with me because there's someone you wanted to sit with in the back or something. You know, something like that. You don't think he'll suspect anything, do you?" Maria asked almost breathlessly, her golden eyebrows furrowed as she bit down on another Biscotti with what looked to be many thoughts flying around behind her eyes.

Greg was so infected by her excitement that he almost answered her without bothering to think about the words she'd just spoken. Then, like a pack of Grissom's cockroaches set loose on the pavement, her words crawled their way into the epicenter of his comprehension.

And the wrecking ball came smashing into his solar plexus.

"Uhhhhh..." he faltered, looking around as if thinking over something important, forcing himself to keep smiling.

"Oh! I forgot! I have two tickets to see Bass Jumpin' Jazz over at the LVU amphitheater, I'm not really into that sort of thing but I thought maybe you'd like to have them? They're worth more than the ticket price difference but if you're not into them, I'll just write you a check" Maria offered, opening up her stylish navy leather purse to pull out a pair of crisp concert tickets, along with her checkbook.

"Um, yeah, that's...tickets. Wow, Bass Jumpin' Jazz. Nice..." Greg managed out, taking the tickets in his hand and hoping to god she didn't see his embarrassment.

He suddenly felt as if everyone in the coffee joint knew what a fool he'd been, and he was half expecting the lot of them to come tell him that of course she was interested in Nick Stokes.

All the ladies were lately.

Nina popped into his mind then, and he thought back over her intimations she was dating again after mentioning Nick's awesomeness with those golden stars just twinkling away in her crystalline eyes. He screwed his eyes shut with a wince when Maria wasn't looking, realizing what he'd just done. Nina was just getting back into dating after recovering from a painful divorce and there he was sending smokin' hot competition directly into her playing field.

The warden inside his head stopped kicking the inside of his skull just long enough to beat his brain with a figurative nine iron.

"Thank you so much for this. I just never get a chance to talk to him. Marilyn in accounts said he's sensitive, and stable, and obviously he's so athletic. I usually don't take a risk like this but I'll be thirty next month, and well, you know how that goes. Tick tock, tick tock" she explained, imitating a pendulum by gently swinging her arm from side to side.

"Mmh-hmm" replied Greg absent mindedly, trying to decide whether it would be worse to come off like an idiot and potentially look like a liar if he told Maria that Nick was actually seeing someone, or whether it would be worse to tell Nina the truth about what he'd done and risk the chance she might actually kick him in the shins.

He was trying to make his decision when, as if on cue, his cell phone chirped from the table to alert him there was a new text message.

He grabbed it eagerly, flipping it open with great anticipation.

_I give up - where are you? We still on? In the back conference room. Will you be joining? -SS_

Greg felt a sweet wave of relief wash over him, like he did whenever he was returning from a long road trip and finally caught sight of home after hours of driving through unfamiliar territory. He gave Maria a brief apology for using his phone, then his fingers danced over the keypad with deft swiftness.

_Gold star for timing. B there in 20 gouges. xxxx_

He'd meant to write 'gorgeous' instead of 'gouges' but he was too hurried to argue with predictive text input. He slapped his phone shut, gathering up his sport coat and dropping a twenty and a ten on the table to cover the order plus a generous tip.

"Sorry, that was the lab, I've gotta head back" he told her apologetically, taking pains not to rush out of there as fast as he actually wanted to.

He just wanted to get away. He wanted to get away from the beautiful girl who didn't want to date him, from the amplified voices of pretentious poets on the microphone, from having to make choices he didn't want to make.

Reasonably, he thought, Nick Stokes probably wouldn't go for a girl like Maria Harcourt over a girl like Nina Sorrensen anyway. Nick going to a work related presentation with someone else who worked in the lab made perfect platonic sense. Greg dug deep into his logic of convenience, the logic that never failed to save his ass when he got himself into a sticky situation. It told him there really was no problem, that everything really would be okay.

Then he looked at his reflection staring back at him in the black glass of the coffee shop window, and it became clear there was only one thing he could do.

"Look, I should probably mention Nick is actually seeing someone right now. I don't know how serious it is, but he's definitely seeing someone" Greg told her, resting his butt against the stool behind him rather than actually sitting in it.

He prepared himself to deal with her disappointment and annoyance at him, so he was surprised when all she did was shrug.

"Oh that's no problem! I had a feeling he might be anyway, men like that are never short of admirers" Maria said with pleasant conviction.

Greg sighed hard with relief, retrieving the Bass Jumpin' Jazz tickets from his pocket to hand back to her.

Maria seemed confused.

"What are you doing?"

Greg's words got caught in his throat for a moment. He let out a sound resembling a slight croak, then he continued.

"Giving you back the tickets" he said simply, wondering if he'd missed something.

"Why? Would you prefer a check?" she asked, posing to retrieve her checkbook were he to confirm.

Greg didn't know what the hell to do with that. He had fully expected her to back off after telling her Nick was seeing someone and now that she hadn't, the fertile fields of his mind dried up into a black void.

"But...Nick is...He's seeing someone" Greg repeated, rubbing his left temple with his index and forefinger.

"Yes, I understand that but you said it's not serious and even if it was, I'm just going to a lecture with him. It's not like it's an official date or anything. Is he seeing that temp girl from trace? That smoker girl? I've seen them together a lot but it always looks like a weird match to me. He's so put together, you know? And she's...well, she's just not" Maria explained, taking another dainty sip, another dainty bite of biscotti, and looking at Greg with an utterly innocent, conversational sort of face.

Greg suddenly felt his blood bubble a little inside his veins, and for just a split second his dark eyes turned into daggers.

Fashion doll Cher took the stage again, causing more than a few patrons to push past Greg as they made their way closer. Greg watched as the poetess stood massaging the microphone in one hand as she stared at the platform beneath her feet, slowly running her free hand back over her long black hair. She picked up her head and stared at everyone, her action setting off a muted wave of clapping.

Greg rolled his eyes and turned back to Maria.

"She's a great girl actually, everyone thinks so" Greg blurted out suddenly, sounding way more petulant than he would have liked.

"Oh I know!" Maria emphatically agreed before knocking back the last of her coffee in one large gulp.

"Some people might even say she's a peach. By some people I mean Nick Stokes!" Greg continued unabated, raising his voice a little over fashion doll Cher's shouts.

"A peach? Really? That's funny because most people call her an atomic bomb of truth!" Maria called back to him over the increasingly loud audience, and she walked past him for a better view of the performance.

Greg was confused. He knew Nina definitely had her fiery moments but he unable to think of a situation where she could be considered the atomic bomb of _anything_, let alone an atomic bomb of truth. He was about to ask Maria where she'd heard such a thing, then he saw her gazing in awe once again and realized she'd been referring to fashion doll Cher the whole time.

Greg sighed.

There was just nothing for it. Not right then anyway. He had a feeling within the next twenty-four hours he would see Nina, Nick, and Maria getting all pissed off at him for various reasons and he just accepted it.

At least there was Sara.

He always had Sara.

"I'm heading out" Greg announced, feeling like was pretty much already gone.

"Okay! Hey thanks again, I owe you one..." Maria told him, only giving him half her attention as fashion doll Cher grew louder and louder, "You might want to hurry, I heard the waitress say it looks like rain. Don't want to mess up your chic haircut!".

She laughed and winked before turning away. It still made Greg feel a little fluttery in the chest, but instead of anticipation it felt a hell of a lot like pain. She turned her attention back to the stage in the corner, and Greg didn't bother saying another word.

A crowd had packed itself into the coffee shop to gawk at the poets, lots of Friday night stragglers trying to sober up after a night out or just stopping for a break before continuing the party. Greg pushed through the frat boys with their beer breath and past many tipsy couples making out. He ignored the ogling stares of a particularly woozy looking college girl, scooting away quickly when she started making motions like she was going to hug him. He pushed the back of his shoulder against the exit door to open it, and an unusually crisp burst of Vegas air hit him as he made his way out into the night.

He didn't look back once.

As he made his way down the steep incline of the sidewalk Greg could see dozens of Friday night revelers making their way toward the strip, the ground almost vibrating from the pounding bass music heard in the distance. In days past he would have felt drawn to it all, but all of a sudden he just wanted to run. He stood on the corner listening to a young couple flirting themselves silly as he waited for the signal to walk, and he found himself pounding the hell out of the button with his finger. The light was taking way too long to change, though the music seemed to be drifting further away.

Once Greg was through the front doors of the lab he felt a little better, no matter what he said to the contrary the lab was like his home away from home and being there did wonders whenever he felt threatened or otherwise stirred. Knowing Sara was there waiting for him with time on her hands added to that comfort tenfold. He slipped off his sport coat, keeping his eyes close to the ground in the hopes he would not invite anyone to talk to him. Before dealing with anything else, he just wanted to talk to Sara.

He made his way past the bulletin boards, but moreover he made his way past Neil Donovan. Neil Donovan who stood there making faces of disgust at a photo of a particularly obese bald man wanted for murder, slicking back his hair with the comb he always kept hanging out of his back pocket. Greg walked by and winced at the strong scent of Old Spice wafting from the guy's personal space, quickening his pace to reach fresher air by the air conditioning vents since he wasn't really in the mood for suffocation-by-cologne just then.

Just when he thought he was free, he turned on his heels quickly as he spotted David Hodges chatting to Wendy Simms over a cart full of evidence. He made his escape swiftly, not wanting to get caught in the middle when it became obvious they were having a disagreement over who got custody first. He put his head down as far as it would go, denying his urge to eavesdrop in favor of his urge to reach Sara as soon as possible.

He found himself standing not two feet behind the back of the one and only Nick Stokes as he collected some mail and made small talk with Judy Tremont. His blue overalls were covered in dust, as was his hair. He was wiping his dirty face with a towel explaining how the airbag inside the truck from Catherine's crime scene decided to inflate and explode when they went fiddling with it, and how both of them should have known better. Greg spied Judy pouring out a fresh batch of striped melt away mints and watched as Nick took a hefty handful.

Greg ached to take a handful himself, knowing they were sure to disappear with Neil Donovan standing in such close proximity, but he knew he couldn't do it without having to discuss both the Nina situation _and_ the Maria situation. He was not ready to do that, so he stuck to his first instincts.

He'd been wanting to talk to Sara for almost 24 hours and he wasn't going to let anyone get in his way now that he was so close. Greg backed away from Nick and stared down the hall, he could see the entrance to the back conference room already. For reasons he couldn't explain he got a sudden sensation of panic to hurry up, like he used to get whenever he'd shut off the basement light at home and go tearing up the stairs feeling like shadow monsters were heavy on his heels. He decided to jog to the conference room, thinking those old rules about never running in the halls were for suckers.

That is, until he almost crashed right into the woman who came rushing out of the ladies room at a hundred miles per hour.

She was harried with her cheeks flushed a rosy pink, and once Greg's eyes fell upon her she looked both astonished and more than exceedingly guilty.

It was Nina, and she was dressed to the nines.


	10. To Leave Her Be, Or Not To Leave Her Be

She wore a black & white polka dot wrap dress of sheer fabric over a black lining that lay snugly against each one of her curves, with a flowing skirt that stopped just above her knees. Two high-heeled strappy black sandals adorned her petite feet, and her mane of chestnut hair was secured behind her head in a pouch of black netting; the tendrils around her face trained into glossy finger waves. Her lips were ruby red, her crystal olive eyes lined with smoky Kohl.

Greg just stared at her.

"Wow" He said with a subdued sort of awe, raising his left hand to the back of his head for an absent minded scratch.

Nina still looked like a deer caught in the headlights, but her happy eyes got turned on just the same.

"Yeah? Y'think?..." Nina asked with quiet contentment, drawing closer to Greg in a conspiratorial whisper, "Actually, I looked like crap before but then Catherine did the hair and make-up for me. _Totally_ saved my _ass_".

Greg grinned at her hallmark candor, helping Nina steady herself while she secured a loose strap on one of the sandals. She did a few hops, heels clacking on the ground, a small shell shaped maroon purse hanging awkwardly from her elbow on its short silver chain.

"Well you look great now" Greg told without any filter on his thoughts.

"Thanks, just cross your fingers I don't get the sweats and stain this dress, it cost me like...well, I don't _even_ want to talk about how expensive this thing was" she said with a slight bulge of her eyes, regaining her balance and smoothing the dress down over her hips.

Greg thought she looked incredibly put together, and he found himself wishing certain people might wander in to see it.

"I think I'm ready now. I mean, ready as I'll ever be anyway" Nina announced, puffing her cheeks and blowing air through her lips.

"For...?" Greg asked.

He was pretty sure Sorrensen wouldn't get all decked out just to process trace evidence, though he wouldn't put it past her completely.

Nina looked down the hall toward reception, bit her lip, then looked back at Greg.

"Y'know, a date sort of thing" she responded, rather bashfully.

Greg furrowed his eyes immediately, twisting his head with a jerk to have another look into reception just in case something had magically changed in the two minutes that had passed.

No, Nick was still standing there in his filthy overalls, wiping grime from his increasingly sweaty forehead.

"He really doesn't look ready for a _date_, you sure you got that right?" Greg asked, his confusion increasing as he saw Nick go over to Hodges and Wendy to play mediator in their disagreement.

"He looks ready to me" Nina replied, the confusion in her voice near equal to Greg's.

Greg squinted again, trying to make sense of it. He wondered if Nick was hiding one of his slick date night outfits beneath his dirty jumpsuit or if Nina just liked him so much she didn't care what he wore.

"He looks like shit Sorrensen" he said, one brow raised.

Nina gently backhanded him.

"He _does not. _Look, I know he's not your favorite person in the world, that's why I didn't want to tell you about tonight. I'm a big girl though Greg, and I really think I'm ready to get back out there. I mean, I don't _know_, but I'm pretty sure I am. I know you don't like him but can you just be cool? For me?" Nina rambled at him in cautious tones, fussing a little over her hair again.

Greg stood there feeling himself riding right past the confusion depot before pulling directly into consternation station. He tried wrapping his head around her words, knowing either he had gone terribly wrong somewhere or she had, but not having the foggiest idea which. He tried figuring it out, but he was too mentally drained to make heads or tails of anything.

"What the hell are you _talking_ about? I'm fine with you dating Nick, I _like_ Nick. I just said I don't think he looks ready for a date. I mean, _look_ at the guy" Greg replied, using his hands, game show host style, to indicate his nearby colleague; Nick sneezing and blowing his nose into his towel, much to the chagrin of Hodges.

Nina's mouth hung open for a second like she'd just been poked with a needle, but then she just grinned.

"_Nicky_? You thought I was talking about going out with Nicky?" Nina asked, a giggle escaping her before she slapped her hand over her mouth.

While Nina took a moment to scrunch her nose at the lipstick smear she'd gotten on her palm, Greg went fishing for every word exchanged in their earlier conversation in trace. He was certain she had mentioned Nick's name and he was determined to find the proof of such. When he realized the voice of fashion doll Cher yelling her man-hating rants was drowning out everything else, he decided to go on blind faith.

"You said you were going out with him. You _said_ you were dating him" pushed Greg, hoping he was right.

Then it hit him.

"Wait, no you didn't" he added, more confused than ever.

"No. I didn't" Nina confirmed, her head darting rapidly from left to right as she searched for something to wipe her hand on.

Greg produced a Jaybird's napkin from the pocket of his jeans and held it out.

"Danke schoen" thanked Nina, receiving it with relief.

Greg peered over into the reception area, his eyes jumping over each potential suspect. Nick was out, he was pretty sure David Hodges was out. As his eyes slowly crawled toward the bulletin boards near the entrance hall, he realized there was only one suspect left.

And once again his blood pressure spiked, his eyes bulging out as he turned back to Nina with mouth agape.

"_Neil Donovan? _You're going out with _that_?" Greg demanded in a harsh whisper, raising his arm to point directly at him, not even trying to be inconspicuous about it.

Nina shoved his arm back down.

"Shhhh! Quit that!" she reprimanded, grabbing the sleeve of his coat to pull him closer toward the bathroom door and further from Neil's potential view.

Greg looked Nina over once again, inhaling the delicate scent of cherry blossoms that was her perfume. She was nice, and she was sweet, and she had a cheerful soul. Nick Stokes would know how to appreciate that. Even if god forbid she had been going out with David Hodges he would have had more chance of appreciating things like that than Neil Donovan ever could. Neil probably thought girls like her came out of vending machines.

It was all wrong. Just like the mohawked punk rock wannabe she dated sophomore year, just like that pseudo-intellectual anthropology major that broke her heart junior year.

Just like Elliot 'Hot Shot' Mendes.

Greg felt sick.

"Neen, you _can't_ go out with that guy. Look at the way he's standing, if he clenches any tighter he's gonna implode on himself" Greg heard himself say, his petulance ringing out like a train whistle.

Nina's crystal eyes narrowed, her nostrils flared ever so slightly, and her lips became tight.

"You're friggin' _mean_" she said, with all the ferocity of an irate chipmunk.

Greg didn't know exactly how to respond to that, so he just let her take the reins since she was just bound to anyway.

"I knew you'd do this. You wanted to know why I didn't say anything? _This_ is why. I know he comes off snobby and kind of up himself but he's really not. _I like him,_ Sanders and that's all that should matter. Did you hear me say anything about Maria? _Nooooo_. " Nina said, folding her arms with satisfaction.

Greg was frozen in place, his brown eyes almost boring a hole through her from beneath his dark brows.

"_What's wrong with Maria?"_ Greg asked, his voice a very forced monotone.

Upon asking that question, Greg realized he had a good six or seven answers already available inside his own head though he felt no need to mention any of them.

"Nothing" Nina replied curtly, folding her arms in a decidedly haughty stance.

"No. Please. Do tell" Greg encouraged, and he experienced an overwhelming urge to mess up her hair like he did whenever she picked on him during the old midnight cram sessions at Stanford.

Nina looked like she knew it too.

"You _really_ wanna do this _now?_" Nina challenged, her voice taking on a deep, throaty quality as she leaned in closer to him, her eyes all afire.

"I'm sorry, am I keeping you from something?" Greg inquired, peering over his shoulder to get a glimpse of Neil using the long silver chain attached to his belt to swing his wallet around like he was a cowboy with a lasso.

Before Nina could answer, there came a loud wolf whistle that took them both by surprise. It came from Nick Stokes as he strode up beside Greg, looking Nina over with a grin the size of his home state of Texas.

"Well _hello_ fine lady! You're lookin' very lovely this evening Miss Nina" Nick said, giving her a wink before regarding Greg somewhat reproachfully.

"Thanks! Catherine did the hair and make-up. That woman is magic with any kind of brush in her hand, I swear to god" Nina gushed, quickly glancing at Neil before fishing a mirror out of her purse to check her lips.

Nick put his arm around Greg's shoulder.

"Doesn't she look nice Greg? Like...an old time movie star or somethin'?" Nick asked, and Greg felt him squeeze his shoulder firmly.

"Yep. She's a doll alright" Greg answered with a stiff grin.

"So where are you and ol' Neil off to then?" Nick inquired, holding on to Greg like a testy canine he didn't trust not to take off running.

"We're going dancing. Neil knows a bunch of the bouncers over at The Palace Grand and it's swing night. I've never been able to get in over there before, I can't _wait._ I haven't been dancing in forever" Nina told him, the gold sparkles in her eyes lighting up like fireflies once again.

"Now that sounds like a good time. Don'tcha think Greg?" Nick asked, like there was no tension floating around whatsoever.

"Awesome" Greg answered, trying not to make a face when he recognized a flit of triumph in Nina's happy eyes.

"Great, great..." Nick added, nodding in approval.

A few moments passed then, all of them standing silent whilst nodding like bobble heads in the back window of a car.

"Oh, hey Greg! I wanted to tell you, remember that fire hydrant situation we were talkin' about before? You know the guy who kept claimin' that fire hydrant was his property instead of the county's, and he got all crazy and _stupid_ whenever anyone else went near it? 'Member?" Nick asked, his dark eyes fixed like tractor beams on Greg.

Greg didn't know what the hell he was talking about at first, but little pegs of memory went tumbling around inside his mind until they fell neatly into their little holes. Greg closed his eyes briefly, and he betrayed his understanding with one glance in Nick's direction.

"I remember" Greg replied, simply and directly.

"Yeah, well good news. A friend of his finally talked some sense into the fella, got him to leave the damn thing alone. He agreed to just let it be. I guess he's still afraid someone might mess with it, or break it, but I think he understands it's not helpin' anyone to just hover over it like he was. Y'know, because it's _not his_. So it all worked out, he's gonna back off and now he doesn't have to worry about anyone from the LVPD goin' out there to give him an ass whoopin' for actin' like a dumb ass" Nick concluded, grinning wildly and giving Greg's shoulder another squeeze that was so firm it damn near hurt.

"That's...that's good" Greg agreed, smiling on the outside but snarling on the inside.

"Yeah, I thought you'd like that. Alright, well y'all have a good night now and missy you get out there and cut that rug" Nick said with great satisfaction, giving Nina another wink as he made his way past them into the men's room.

Nina beamed as she waved at him. She seemed to be reading something inside her head for a second, then her expression changed in an instant.

"So wait,... some dude was attacking people for using a fire hydrant?" Nina inquired, her upper lip curled with a face of abject confusion.

Greg's face drained a little then, his mouth hung open just slightly as he rolled his head around atop his neck like he was struggling to stay awake.

"No, not attacking. Nobody was _attacking_ anybody. He just...he was just worried about his fire hydrant. Okay it wasn't actually _his_ fire hydrant but he felt _protective_ of it. He just didn't want it to get hurt by some careless asshole with cheap shoes" Greg told her, wishing Nick would come back into the fold since he was the only one who would know what the hell he was actually talking about.

"_Riiiiight_. Sounds like a fruitcake" Nina remarked with a roll of her eyes, her manner becoming more hurried and rushed as she once again fussed over herself.

Greg couldn't help but take it personally.

"He's not a fruitcake" he grumbled, but it was too quiet for Nina to hear.

"Look, I've gotta go Sanders. Are we cool?" Nina asked, not seeming very interested in the answer as she barely looked at him.

"Whatever" Greg replied, thinking he really was a fool for ever having left his bed that morning.

Nina let out a sigh, shaking her head from side to side.

"Fine, be that way. I'll see you tomorrow. I'm _going_ now, you lepton" She announced haughtily, preening herself for the final time as if she had already forgotten he was standing there.

Greg watched her turn with a toss of her head and fetch a silver tennis bracelet from her purse before hastily fastening it around her wrist. Greg felt a surge of indignant energy go shooting up his spine as he replayed her words in his head.

She had called him a lepton; the smallest and weakest of all subatomic particles, her nerd insult of choice and one she had not thrown his way since their days at Stanford.

To Greg, it was just the same as throwing down a gauntlet.

The indignant energy which felt like it had been building for days flooded all through his body with unstoppable force as Nina began to walk off; hence he didn't even try to stop himself when he saw his very own palm sweeping upward for a swift slap to her ass.

Nina stopped dead in her tracks, and Greg sneered with satisfaction. She grabbed her rear end protectively and whirled around to face him, eyeing him with icy wrath. He was thrilled to see that she was utterly shocked.

"Have a lovely evening" he said cordially.

She only stood there looking astonished for about five seconds total, but Greg relished every single one of those five.

"You _will_ pay for that" She replied with certainty.

"I look forward to it" Greg said, giving her a decorous little nod of his head for effect.

Nina mouthed a few silent swear words at him, and though her face was stern Greg easily detected teases of a smile playing at the corners of her ruby lips, that familiar conspiratorial glitter dancing in her eyes.

She shouldn't have been walking off to join Neil Donovan, but Greg knew he just had to leave her be.

Greg watched, his chin in his chest, as she approached her date to give him a very formal looking hug. She exchanged a few words with him before they linked arms and strolled off toward the entrance doors. He watched as she laughed at something Neil said, he watched as their figures became smaller and smaller, he watched as she kept on going further away.

And then, she did it.

She looked back.

He felt his heart tumble a little, he inhaled sharply with a little bit of a tremble in his diaphragm. Still, the indignant energy had not fully run its course just yet so almost on instinct he shot her an obnoxious grin so wide it was almost grotesque, every single one of his teeth exposed from ear to ear.

She narrowed her eyes and briefly stuck out her tongue at him behind Neil's back.

Then she was gone.

Greg laughed quietly to himself for a few moments, imagining what the look on Nina's face must have been at the exact moment he'd popped her on the behind. He knew she would most definitely stay true to her words and make him pay for it, but he figured he could worry about that later.

As Greg let his weight fall against the wall beside him, he suddenly felt himself becoming somewhat crestfallen. The feeling was strangely exaggerated as he watched Wendy Simms and David Hodges stroll past him pushing the evidence cart together like they were suddenly best pals.

His thoughts turned to the empty apartment waiting for him, and his hand flew up to the interior breast pocket of his jacket to check his mix CD was right where he left it. It comforted him to feel it there, and as he slipped his fingers inside the pocket he realized there was something else tucked in with it. He pulled it out and remembered just what that something was. He unfolded the note, glancing once again over the handwritten words.

He wanted so much for it to make sense.

His eyes fell on the alcove which housed the timecard machine, wondering if it really was just time for him to clock the hell out and drive the streets again so he could think. Just him, his mix CD, his car, and if he was lucky hopefully there might also be some peace. He was once again overcome with the urge to start driving toward California without stopping when he felt a presence come up behind him.

"There you are, I was about to give up on you. You said you'd be here in twenty gouges but I think it's been more like thirty"

Greg breathed a massive sigh of relief as she came around to face him.

Twinkling eyes and a mind-meld smile.

Sara Sidle.


	11. Letting It Go

The back conference room was the coldest room in the entire crime lab, due to the fact it was once the primary evidence storage lock-up before renovations. Greg sat at the large oval shaped table, his hands tucked into his armpits for warmth, Sara sitting beside him reading the letter.

His brain felt clogged, an incomprehensible number of thoughts crashing into each other until they fused into one big lump. He wished to be a computer, that way Sara could just plug into it and see every thought inside his head illuminated on a flat screen monitor. Greg thought it would have been so much easier, but circumstances being what they were he was left to figure out how to express himself without the aid of modern technology.

"They seem like such a nice family. Like, really nice" he offered weakly, furrowing his brows as he tried getting a grip on what it was he really wanted to say.

"Yeah, they do. She's got a lot of support, it sounds like she's gonna be okay Greg. I could see it in her face that night, she's a strong lady" Sara replied, gingerly folding the letter as if she didn't want to hurt it.

"I saw it too, it's just..."

Greg couldn't continue just then, the muscles in his throat seized and made it hard for him to swallow. He pulled a tray containing a pitcher and some drinking glasses toward him from the middle of the table, eagerly pouring himself some water. He gulped it all down in three massive swallows, feeling steadied by the action.

"Just what?" encouraged Sara, sliding the letter back to its rightful owner.

The pain in Greg's chest had returned with a vengeance, his heart thrashing about violently beneath his breast plate. No longer able to push it away inside his head, it was like the darkness found its way back to him and suddenly spread itself over everything in the room, making it all look gray.

"It shouldn't have happened. I keep looking at how her niece used the word 'animal' in two different contexts, I keep thinking it's an insult to the dog. There were all those pictures around the trailer, her smiling with all these different kids and there were pictures all over the fridge, probably from those same kids, telling her how much they love her. Pictures of her and all her dogs at the park having a great time. And then this... _scum_ just goes in there and..."

Greg paused to contain himself, gripping his glass in his hand, feeling a sense of much needed security when he thought about the wavelengths of light busy increasing and decreasing as they refracted off the curve of it. His vision blurred slightly then, but he inhaled a deep breath to prevent it from getting worse.

"He did what he did, and all I could think about last night was how far the impact of what he did could really spread out. Ms. Wilkes, her dogs, her family, and even us. I almost brought it up with Nina a couple times today but then I just thought; why spread it out even further? Why hit another person with it? It's like seismic waves, y'know? At what point do they stop traveling? At what point do they stop _shaking_ people?"

He was rambling then, not so much concerned with making sense as he was with plucking out all the thoughts he had trapped inside his head for a week.

"Then I got the letter, and the jacket. I didn't even want to wear it, it was like I didn't want to go back to that moment. I just shoved it into my locker. Then I thought; how would she feel if she saw me do that? It's not because of anything she did, it's not her fault...it's just..."

Greg couldn't continue then, he dropped his glass upon the table and dropped his forehead into the palms of his hands. He squeezed his eyes shut tightly, not wanting to look weak in front of Sara though he knew she would be the last person to ever judge him for it.

The air conditioning system rattled on, sending fresh bursts of icy air down into the room. Greg shivered, wishing again to be on the shores of Half Moon Bay, or at least back to some state of being that felt warm.

"Maybe I'm not cut out for being a CSI after all" he heard himself say, letting out a shudder of a nervous laugh.

Before he knew it, he felt Sara's hand upon his shoulder, giving it a firm squeeze.

"Why not? Because you're angry and sad a kind woman was brutalized in the middle of the night? Being a CSI doesn't mean you stop being human. Greg, I know this probably won't help because it didn't help me much when I first started, but everything you're going through is normal, all those thoughts are normal..." she said, pouring him another glass of water with her free hand whilst still massaging his shoulder with the other.

"When I started back in San Francisco, the other CSIs there were always telling me it was normal to get sleepless nights and stomach trouble. Normal to feel like puking once a week for a year. Then they would turn around and reprimand me for getting too involved. I started thinking they must be crazy, and I thought I would become some kind of, I don't know, superhero CSI or something. I really believed I could solve the case _and_ solve the victim's problems if I just committed seriously enough. I kept every single letter, every single gift a victim ever brought me, I kept them in a box right next to my old love letters and yearbooks. I thought keeping those things close by would keep me focused on my commitment and make me a better CSI, I thought it would help things make more sense..." Sara continued, staring off as she recalled her memories.

"Then I woke up in Las Vegas and realized I had more boxes of stuff from victims and cases than I did from my own past, or from friends or family. Violent crimes were still senseless to me and on top of that, I didn't know how to have a life of my own anymore. It took someone very close to me to wake me up and finally force me to listen to everything those veteran CSIs had been trying to tell me all along..."

Sara paused then, tilting her head closer to the table in order to catch Greg's gaze. He sipped at his water, swallowed it down his tight throat, and finally looked at her. Her brown eyes were kind and wise.

"It's okay to get those sleepless nights sometimes, it's okay to hide out on your cave and grieve when a case hits you hard, it's okay to decide you have to get rid of those connections to the victims and move on. And Greg, it's okay to let it go and have a life of your own. It doesn't make you a bad CSI, it makes you a _better one_" Sara told him in no uncertain terms, giving him an encouraging smile.

Greg gave an instant replay to her words over and over inside his head, stunned at how perfectly her words made sense. He suddenly felt every single knot in his chest unfurling at the same time, the release of tension so powerful he let out another shuddering laugh.

Then his vision blurred to the point of blindness, he let go, and then his forehead fell into palms as he cried.

"I know I can't do anymore than I already have, I know I did my job. I know I can't ask why it had to happen to her,...I just want her to be okay" Greg managed out, grateful the blinds on the conference room windows were closed tightly as he retrieved another Jaybird's napkin from his pocket to wipe his nose.

"She will be, Greg. She will be. For the same reason you'll be alright, she'll be alright" Sara told him, the assured cadence in her voice not faltering once, as she rubbed his back.

"What reason is that?" asked Greg, his voice a little clearer, as he picked his head up to face her once more.

Sara's brown eyes twinkled anew, and she gave him a mind meld smile to end all mind meld smiles in the history of their relationship.

"Because she has family, and they love her".

Greg kept his eyes locked with hers, in no rush to look away. He hadn't even realized how isolated he had truly felt until Sara had reminded him he was not alone. He'd been around proof of her statement all day long, but he hadn't really understood until Sara said it aloud. He was so used to being the kid who could figure out problems so quickly that it was still a challenge remembering some answers, by their very nature, revealed themselves slowly over time. There were just some things that wouldn't make sense without first a period of trial and error.

He wanted to tell her how grateful he was, he wanted to tell her how unbelievably amazing she was as a human being and a CSI. He blew his nose into his napkin, holding it tight in his hand when he was through, and summoned up the wherewithal to express what he needed to express.

"Thanks" he said sheepishly, hoping his eyes were saying all the other stuff well enough.

"No problem chum" she replied with another squeeze of his shoulder, refilling Greg's glass once more before pouring some water for herself.

Greg accepted the glass, sniffling as he relaxed into his chair and blew a big puff of air through his lips.

"This job sure has a knack for making me feel like a wuss" he admitted, conflicted about the fact he'd actually outright cried.

"You're not a wuss Greg, if you were a wuss you wouldn't have left the lab for the field in the first place" Sara reminded him, retrieving a small packet of vitamins from her pocket.

"So you mean I'd be Hodges" Greg confirmed, watching Sara's face expectantly.

She almost had the tumbler of water to her lips when she paused, closed her eyes, and smirked. She opened her eyes, then she turned directly to Greg.

"Something like that" she said.

As Sara sat taking her vitamins one by one, Greg just let himself reflect on the moment and all that had been exchanged. He thought back to the first time he'd ever thrown himself out in the field; the night of the massive bus crash that saw him screwing-up left and right since he wasn't even trained to be out there at the time. He thought of how determined he was to show initiative for a new position back then, even it meant annoying the crap out of Grissom at every turn.

In the course of just forty seconds he thought about all the many cases that had passed since. Each one of them had come with a new lesson that went further than just mastering some new processing techniques, lessons he realized were shaping him as the man he was becoming.

Before the Wilkes case he had not been all that unlike Sara, chasing the dragon toward some unattainable goal to master the art of being a CSI. His mental storage bin suddenly popped open and he remembered Nina's speech about his bad habit of putting women he didn't even know up on pedestals, getting carried away with ideas of what they were going to be like before he ever gave himself a chance to see who they really were.

Greg could plainly see he had approached his career as a CSI much the same way without realizing it. Since the day he left the lab he'd been aiming to master it all, and every case he'd worked since then had taught him his ideas about what being a CSI was _going_ to be like in no way resembled what being a CSI actually _was_. It was not finite like individual chromosomes or rigid like quantum mechanics. It was fluid and ever changing. Having the title of CSI was the only constant, everything else was up in the air.

He remembered all his fantastical visions of where he thought he'd be at that point in time, he let them come tumbling down off their pedestals, and then he let them go.

"You okay?" Sara asked, taking a moment to check her phone.

"Yeah, I think so..." Greg answered, and then his thoughts turned to the bag sitting at the bottom of his locker.

"So you think I should I just get rid of the jacket?" he asked.

Sara clicked her phone closed, taking a moment to consider whatever thoughts were behind her eyes, and then she took a deep breath.

"Don't take this the wrong way, but you need to decide for yourself on that. Maybe you'll always feel the same way about it as you do now, but maybe it'll change. You're going to come across a lot of things just like that jacket in this job Greg, you're going to have to decide what it's all going to mean for you" Sara told him, giving him a half smile.

Greg let out yet another nervous laugh, eyeing her just the slightest bit.

"God, now you're even starting to _sound_ like him" he said with an affectionate sort of criticism, rolling his eyes, a half smile of his own spreading over his lips.

Sara's eyes twinkled brighter then.

"I don't know _what_ you're talking about" she replied, feigning innocence.

"Yeah...next you'll be giving me tips based on all the ways sphinx moths cope with stress or something" Greg teased, with his words and his eyes.

"Sphinx moths, Greg? I've never even heard of those. _Now_ who sounds like him?" Sara teased back, leaning to nudge her shoulder against his.

Greg laughed aloud then, letting all the remaining tension inside him ride out as he did.

"Speaking of _him_, I better get back and do some actual work today, before he fires my ass and the question of whether or not I'm cut out for this job won't matter" he said, rising to his feet.

"Same here, Doc Robbins is waiting on me downstairs and I know better than to keep him waiting" said Sara, following his lead toward the door.

"Hey, thanks for talking to me, or, thanks for listening I mean. I think I just needed to tell someone who understands" he confessed, dropping his napkin into the trash and hoping it hadn't been obvious he'd been crying.

"Any time Greg. And listen, don't hold it in so long next time. If you want to talk it out, talk it out. Don't worry about seismic waves, and especially don't worry about that with Nina. She cares about you Greg, and I think she understands a lot more than you might think" Sara told him as they stepped out into the hallway together, pausing a moment to look him in the eye.

Greg rested his weight against the wall at his side on instinct, feeling a little bit of guilt come leaping upon his back.

"Yeah, I guess. I mean,...she's alright I guess" he faltered, suddenly feeling quite cornered.

"You _guess_?" pushed Sara, folding her arms across her stomach.

Greg squinted his left eye, tilted his head, and scratched at the back of his neck.

"Yeah" he replied with a shrug, flashing Sara a somewhat devious looking smirk.

She gave a gentle sigh as she dropped her arms and wrapped her thumbs around the belt loops of her slacks. Sara turned toward the hallway leading to the coroner's office, rolling her eyes and shaking her head as she walked off.

"What?" Greg called after her, throwing his arms out wide at his sides.

"You're hopeless, you know that!" she called back to him, twinkling at him as she rounded the corner.

Seeing his friend beginning to disappear from view caused Greg to feel a sudden and strong wave of separation anxiety, and without thinking he ran after her.

"Hey Sara! You wanna do something after shift? Maybe catch a movie or hit up Frank's?" he asked, leaning around the corner with great anticipation shone on his face.

"Awe, I can't tonight Greggo, I'm sorry. I'll be down in autopsy for at least another hour and then I've got a ton of peer review stuff to finish for Ecklie" Sara said regretfully, biting her bottom lip just the slightest bit.

"Oh, okay. No problem, just thought I'd ask" Greg replied, nodding his head and hiding his disappointment beneath a friendly grin.

"Rain check?" asked Sara, her hand resting upon the entrance door to the stairwell.

"You know it" he responded, giving her a pair of finger guns.

Once Sara disappeared down the stairs, the hallway seemed to go eerily silent as he stood alone. Still, he felt a lot lighter walking out of that conference room than he had been walking into it, and for that he was grateful.

He thrust his hands into his pockets as he traipsed off toward the locker room, taking his own sweet time. The hour was so late all the lab rats were now hunched over their workstations in concentration, finishing up their respective tasks until shift change came. He wasn't sure where his day had went, it seemed something of a blur in his mind, and while he was looking forward to clocking out he was not looking forward to leaving there alone.

He took to making little visits to each lab on his way to the locker room, seeing what evidence they were working on before idly asking what they were up to after shift. Mandy Webster was going home to nurse her sick tabby cat, Archie Johnson was getting breakfast with a hot red head from vice, and Henry Andrews was looking forward to a nice early morning session of geocaching with his adventure club. Henry asked if Greg would like to come along since there was going to be a treasure swap meet afterward, but as eager as Greg was for company he just couldn't bring himself to accept in the end.

He fetched his lab coat, and almost immediately his eyes darted down the Dempsey's bag at the bottom of his locker. He could smell the lavender permeating, and he tried hard to let the scent conjure up something pleasant in his mind instead of reminding him of that dark and gray morning. It wasn't working though, and so he closed the door no closer to knowing exactly what to do with it. He made his way back out toward the trace lab, hoping Sara was right when she said there was a chance it would eventually come to hold some more pleasant meaning. He so hated the idea of throwing it away.

Greg stepped into trace to find a serene scene before him. With Nina's absence there was no bad reception clanging from the radio and none of her kinetic energies bouncing around the room. The only sound was the gentle hum of Grimmis the GC-MS at work, and the muted tones of a nearby printer busy spitting out results.

Hodges appeared quite content with the atmosphere as he sat before a computer screen searching through a photographic database of magnified headlamp filaments, a subtle smile on his face as he took notes into a case file beside him. Greg watched him for a few moments, seeing if there was any way he could envision himself grabbing a beer with the guy after work. When he failed to get that picture into his head, he just sighed.

"So what needs finishing in here?" Greg asked, gloving up and poking around a couple of plastic bins of new evidence on the back counter.

Hodge whirled around on his stool immediately.

"Don't touch any of that, that's for days. Conrad's overseeing that case and he specifically asked me to get it sorted for day shift so don't...y'know, _ruin it_" grumbled Hodges, using his pen as if it was a magic wand that would levitate Greg up and away from the evidence if he just whipped it around hard enough.

Greg rolled his eyes with a defensive snarl, holding his hands up as if Hodges had a gun pointed at him instead of a pen. He backed away from the counter, then he traipsed lazily over to the bins containing the remainder of unprocessed evidence from Catherine's case.

He flipped through the thick stack of results inside the file, laughing through his nose as he noticed Nina had punctuated the end of a few post-it messages to Catherine with the same scribbly smiley face she used to leave on guest checks as a waitress back in college.

Greg slid the bin of remaining evidence in front of him. He lifted a big manila envelope to see what lay beneath, and the corners of his mouth curled deep into his cheeks at what he found there. He gingerly removed the evidence baggie from its hiding place before quietly transporting it to the central workstation.

"I thought you went home" Hodges said in a monotone, not even bothering to turn around.

"Nope, you get the pleasure of my company for another whole hour" Greg replied with indifference, using a fine toothed metal comb to carefully scrape out every last piece of debris embedded in the tuft of hair atop the ugly little troll doll's head.

"How did your date with our lady risk management go?" Hodges asked, in such a way it suggested he already knew the answer and was smug as hell about it.

Greg eyeballed him fiercely, folding the piece of paper on which he'd collected the trace and funneling the contents down into a prepared vial.

"Fine" he responded, unable to think of vague enough terms to make it sound like the date went great without actually having to outright lie about it.

"Really? Is that why I heard her telling Wendy Simms you're like the little brother she never had?" retorted Hodges, and even though he still didn't turn around, Greg could almost see the smirk coming through the back of his head.

Greg dropped the requisite solvents into the vial and snapped it closed with a firm click, rolling it over to the centrifuge on his stool whilst staring Hodges down. Via Catherine's instructions Greg knew the doll had already been dusted for prints and was now free to be transported to the storage locker down the hall.

That is, it was ready to be transported when he was through with it.

Greg rolled back over to the central work station, grabbed the creepy totem, and then with silent ninja steps he slowly began stepping toward Hodges.

"It's probably for the best that it didn't work out, Conrad always says it's never wise to do all of your shopping at the company store, if you know what I mean. And I have to say, I completely agree with him" Hodges offered, feigning sympathy.

Greg stopped in his tracks just temporarily.

"Ch'yeah, that's why you're always browsing down in DNA" he shot back, keeping a close eye on his unsuspecting colleague.

"Browsing isn't buying, Gregory" Hodges sighed, sending some images to the photo printer across the room.

"Whatever you say..." Greg half whispered just to fill space, tiptoeing through the final stretch.

He held the little troll in his gloved right fist, his fingers like swaddling clothes, its demented looking little face sticking out the top with filthy black hair jutting out at all angles. Greg carefully moved it closer and closer, until it was mere inches away from the side of Hodges' head. When Greg was ready, he squeezed his eyes shut tight, grinned wildly, and tapped him on the shoulder with his free hand.

The serene silence of the trace lab was shattered by the distinctive sounds of David Hodges in distress. Greg had high hopes the man might let out a girlish scream since that was the sound he had always imagined Hodges probably made when frightened. The actual sound was quite different; a low, guttural, extended grunt that seemed to start in his chest and vibrate its way up into his throat. If a bystander didn't know any better they might have thought it was the sound of a really confused and slightly intoxicated grizzly bear.

Hodges stumbled backward off his stool, which sent it flying across the room at breakneck speeds until it crashed into an aluminum cart of tools awaiting a bath in the sterilization unit. He slammed one palm down on the counter beside him for support, furiously rubbing his forehead with the other, struggling to collect himself.

Greg couldn't have been happier in that moment, and he took the opportunity to show the troll his appreciation by rubbing its head with showy affection.

"I think it likes you Hodges" he said.

Hodges puffed out his lips, then squinted his eyes as he nodded furiously. He stood up straight, snapping off his gloves and throwing them to the counter with great force.

"_This_ is why I left L.A." Hodges proclaimed, more to himself than to Greg.

"Trolls?" Greg inquired, genuinely interested to hear the answer.

"Yes, Sanders, exactly. Juvenile, infantile, _unprofessional_ trolls" he said bitterly, stalking off past Greg and into the hallway.

"Hodges come on! Don't go! You two were just getting to know each other" Greg heckled unabated.

David Hodges said nothing more as he stomped off in the direction of Grissom's office, though he did see fit to give Greg a brief but expressive obscene hand gesture.

"I think Uncle Hodges is gonna narc us out to the boss man" Greg warned the troll, looking around the room as if he suddenly expected to find an audience.

The lab was now empty save himself and his little plastic friend. He laughed a little longer while he returned the doll to its original evidence bag, resealed it, and made the requisite notes on the chain of custody sheet. The silence of the room seemed to grow louder in that moment, almost suffocating, and Greg felt a twitch of regret that Nina had missed the whole thing. He knew she would have appreciated the beauty of it more than anyone.

Greg could hear her laughter in his head as he dropped the little troll into the box awaiting transport to storage, and he briefly considered sending her a text message about it. Then he remembered she was probably too busy dancing the night away to pay any attention to texts, and even if she did get it she probably wouldn't have very nice things to say to him at that point in time.

Not that he completely blamed her.

He stood up, then he turned toward Nina's clunky little boom box sitting atop the counter. He turned on the radio, David Hodges be damned, and fiddled with the tuning dial to get the oldies station coming in as clear as possible. The reception was still polluted with a ton of white noise, more than it had been earlier. He moved it around, extended the antenna, but there was no helping it. He knew his favorite hard rock station should come in perfectly, but it just wasn't what he wanted.

He clicked off the radio, and once again the lab fell silent. Greg stared through the windows, watching all of his colleagues finishing up their work with renewed anticipation on their faces as the clocked ticked faster toward shift end. Greg envied them, for they appeared to know exactly what they wanted and where they were going.

Greg sat down upon a stool, elbows down on the counter as he rested his chin in his palms. He watched Grimmis whirring away, waiting for Hodges sequence to finish so that he might start his own. He couldn't ignore the clock like he did earlier, every passing minute got him wondering just what he was going to do once he walked out the front doors.

Only one idea came to mind, only one perfect idea and he didn't care if certain people seemed to think it was an E-Coli outbreak waiting to happen.

Greg was going to Frank's.


	12. At Frank's

The stale air in the diner was heavy with the smell of frying meats, toasting bread, and spicy peppers. It was just past three in the morning on Saturday but those who hadn't slept yet still considered it to be the tail end of Friday night. The atmosphere inside Frank's was laid back and quiet, the youth demographic of Las Vegas avoiding it since every local knew it was a favorite to law enforcement and government officials alike.

On any other night the sound of the television could be heard drowning out most everything else as the owner never missed the news or a sports game of any kind if he could help it. That night he was off, so his feisty pistol of a sixty-five year old wife was in charge. She preferred to flood the place with the sound of music, specifically old time jazz, and so the juke joint rattle of ragtime and old Delta blues held court over the small congregation of patrons enjoying their pancake stacks and greasy burgers.

The interior of Frank's was like a time machine directly back to 1969; battered brown vinyl booths, pendant carriage lanterns with ripple textured yellow glass, a long dining counter made of wood grain Formica, dirty vinyl flooring the color of a speckled tan bird's egg, and a peculiar shade of peach painted upon the walls. Still, with the sounds of "Sweet Georgia Brown" bopping down from the speakers and the golden glow cast down by the lights, Greg could easily trick his mind into thinking he'd just entered some rinky dink coffee shop in a black & white movie taking place during the era of slick bootleggers and sassy dames.

Greg never told anyone, but it was why he loved Frank's so much on Friday's. He liked the population of retired cops that converged on the place, he loved how every single Friday without fail the owner's wife would show up with her white hair trained up into a beehive and recall tales of bygone Vegas with anyone who wanted to join in. Whenever he had a hard week at work, it was a great reminder of why he loved the place he chose to call home so much.

He stood just inside the entrance doors with the Dempsey's bag from his locker clutched loosely in one hand, searching the scene before him for an empty seat to claim. While he was glad to see the place filled up at such a late hour, he was disappointed to see there wasn't a free spot left at the counter. His plan was to sit, listen, and take notes for his newest book project. He wanted to hang around at least until the sun came up, that way he wouldn't have to enter a dark apartment when he finally headed home. He had been forced to grab a booth and eavesdrop on conversations before, but he much preferred being right in the thick of it at the lunch counter.

A waitress happened by and offered to seat him in a booth, but he just smiled and told her he would rather wait for a stool. He gave a sigh, relaxing his weight against the reception podium, and he just let himself sink into the atmosphere. Before he knew it, the upbeat tempo of 'Sweet Georgia Brown' faded away, and in its place came the melancholy voice of Billie Holiday singing "Solitude". Greg heard the crackle of a vinyl record hanging behind each and every note, and felt a wave of eerie calm come over him. The song beckoned him to fall into it just like he would a warm bath, Holiday's voice sounding like some spooky ghost calling from the great beyond.

He clutched his bag a little tighter as he stood alone. He liked listening to the soulful honesty in the singer's voice, but at the very same time he wished the song would hurry to pass because of the deep sense of longing she conveyed. He was making a last ditch attempt to run the hell away from loneliness, and didn't think he particularly needed a song all about that very thing jumping in to needle him in the chest.

He felt like it was messing with his head more than a little. He watched the patrons eating their food, chatting quietly to one another, and they seemed to be doing everything in slow motion. He was put into mind of a story his Papa Olaf had read to him one Halloween when he was little, about a ghost sentenced to relive every year of his own life on earth for eternity without the ability to speak or be seen. Greg really felt like he could be invisible all of a sudden, silent spectator to someone else's memories.

He decided he needed coffee, and needed it quite desperately.

Greg walked a few paces further into the restaurant, peering down the gangway between the row of booths and the counter, hoping to spot the waitress again so he might order a cup. As he searched for her, a rather large man in a John Deere trucker cap dropped a fiver on his table and stood up from his booth. The man cleared the bench, and Greg was then able to see the patron sitting in the adjacent booth behind his. As a sad little clarinet cried and a muted trumpet wailed, Greg couldn't have been more surprised if he tried.

She was sitting alone, sunk down in her booth with her legs stretched beneath the table, her feet resting on the empty seat across from her. Her hair was no longer held back in a tidy little net, instead it was falling around her face in loose waves. Her fancy dress had been replaced by simple tank top in a dusty plum shade and a pair of cocoa colored cotton track pants that were quite faded. Though it appeared she still wore a little bit of make-up, her face looked scrubbed of the glamour she'd been sporting just a few hours earlier.

She tilted her head to peer up above her at a nearby speaker as the sad little ditty played on, regarding it a lot like she regarded Greg whenever he was giving her a hard time. After turning her head straight forward once more, she stared at a small photograph in her hand and idly stirred a fresh cup of coffee in front of her. Her happy eyes had run off somewhere, though she didn't look sad as much as she looked disappointed.

As Greg watched her, he got the sensation of being an intruder on a very private sort of moment for her. He waited a few moments but did not see any sign of Neil Donovan; no second coffee cup on the table and no jacket on the empty seat. He knew her date could not have lasted much longer than a couple of hours if she was already sitting there drinking coffee, and while part of his mind couldn't help thinking '_I told you so'_, the dominant feeling was an ache of sympathy for his friend. He also experienced a sense of comfort knowing he wasn't the only one from the lab having a crappy night, but he felt sort of guilty about that.

He wondered if he should just order his coffee and leave her alone, but before he could even begin to weigh it all out his gut instincts were already moving his feet and taking him toward her. It was a move that was both selfless and self serving at the same time. Selfless in that he was almost a slave to his desires to help others in need, especially friends of the female persuasion. Self-serving in the respect he felt more than a little bit relieved to spot some familiar company himself and wasn't going to walk away from it no matter what mood that familiar company happened to be in.

He stepped lightly, watching her intently, waiting for her to become aware of his presence. A busboy cleared the table at a nearby booth with a loud clatter of glasses, causing Nina to awaken from her thoughts with a jerk of her head. She regarded the busboy with a brief look of interest, then her eyes wandered onto Greg.

She seemed to look right through him for a moment, like she couldn't quite comprehend the fact he was actually standing there. Her confusion gave way soon enough, her eyes narrowing just slightly in Greg's direction, and she slipped the photograph surreptitiously beneath her saucer.

"We have to stop meeting like this, people are gonna start talking" said Greg, a smile spreading across his face as he plunged his hands in pockets and leaned back on the heels of his sneakers.

Nina regarded him with a flutter of her eyes.

"Har har..." she said simply, looking around behind him as if to check he was alone, "What the heck are you doing here?".

"Funny, I was about to ask you the same question" he replied, as if on cue.

Words had officially been exchanged, and so Greg made no hesitation in brazenly flopping into the booth right beside her. He flung his bag into the empty bench across from them before putting his feet up next to hers, and he snagged one of the empty sugar packets next to her cup to start folding miniature, free form origami.

Nina idly stirred her coffee while Greg made a teeny-tiny Chinese throwing star. Once he'd finished that, he used a little puddle of spilled coffee like an ink well and began drawing little doodles on the table top. First he drew some lazy spirals, then he dipped his finger once more and swiftly scribbled a tic-tac-toe board.

He gently elbowed Nina so she would see, and with a point of his finger he indicated she should take the first move. He caught her eyes with his, and while she still appeared a little wary of his presence he saw a spark of camaraderie peeking out from the depths.

She dipped a fingernail and drew a cross in the middle of the board.

"..._And_ the lady takes center square" Greg said as if he were a golf announcer; cocking his eyebrow and shooting Nina a playful smirk as he dipped his finger to put a circle in the upper left square.

He waited to see if she might smile, but her face remained sober as she placed a cross left of center.

"Nicely done. I see you've played this game before..." he remarked as if impressed, blocking her row of crosses by placing a circle right of center, watching again for any signs of a smile.

She smashed her lips together in an awkward pucker to keep from grinning, and she stared at him over her shoulder with her eyes on the brink of becoming cherubic again.

Greg wiggled his eyebrows at her.

Nina narrowed her eyes once more, bit her bottom lip, and in one swift motion she scribbled two crosses on to the board. One cross had been placed in the upper right square and the other in the lower left, and so there were three in a row. She looked satisfied, slashing a line through the three crosses before returning to the stirring of her coffee.

"_Very _nicely done" he said, puffing out his lips as he nodded.

"Danke schoen" she said simply, sighing gently.

He thought about bringing up the fact that she had in intents and purposes just cheated her ass off, but that would have been defeating the purpose of getting her to play in the first place. He had set out to break the tension and succeeded, now it was time to move on to the next phase.

"What happened with your date?" Greg finally inquired, feeling there was room to do so now that he'd managed to eke some sparkle out of her eyes.

She didn't look at him then, she just snagged another sugar packet from the little ceramic holder, a begrudging smirk playing on her face as she gave another gentle roll of her eyes.

"It ended before it even started, that's what happened" she said.

Greg wondered if he should just leave it alone, but then he found that he simply didn't want to.

"Why?" he asked, trying to make that question come out sounding as earnest as possible.

She turned to him then, a critical surveyor as she searched his face. Greg knew exactly what she was looking for, and he knew he couldn't blame her given their history. She was looking for signs of triumph in his face, looking to see if he was waiting for a moment to announce that _'I told you so'_ which had been wriggling around in his mind. While he got the distinct impression he'd most likely been right about the character of Neil Donovan, he didn't feel proud of himself at all.

He tried to show her that with his eyes, and she seemed to get it.

Her face softened again.

"Because...," Nina began, as a little avalanche of sugar came tumbling out of the packet and into her coffee,

"Because if that man had clenched any tighter he would've imploded on himself".

Greg stared at her as she twinkled brightly at him, and he twinkled right back at her. He understood her face perfectly then, so perfectly it was no challenge to pick up on the flit of sadness hiding behind her big crystal eyes.

"I'm sorry Neen" he said sincerely, almost in a whisper.

"Don't be. You were right" she admitted, not one iota of resentment in her voice whatsoever.

It hurt Greg to hear it.

"It doesn't matter, I should have kept my mouth shut. I acted like a dick Nina, I had other crap going on and I took it out on you" he admitted, cringing at the thought of his behavior in the hallway when she was getting ready to leave.

"No, I should have said something to you about him ages ago. I think I _knew_ it was a mistake and I knew you'd call me on it. I only went out with him because he's pretty and he asked, not because I really believed all that crap I said about liking him. Just because I kept wishing I was ready to be out there again, not because I'm anywhere near being ready. Pretty much every single wrong reason you could think of and I knew you'd know that. And obviously you did, you're a friggin' CSI. I was a hypocrite to get on you about not telling me things Greg, and I didn't have any right running my big mouth at you about Maria" rambled Nina, shaking her head at herself as she fiddled clumsily with Greg's tiny little paper star.

Greg found himself grinning from ear to ear as he slid further down in the seat beside her. He felt his as if his body was lighter than air in that moment, and he felt a deep urge to laugh aloud.

"Maria likes Nick. She told me when we got coffee. She was playing the cute card with me because she wanted to trade tickets to the haz-mat safety presentation, just so she could sit next to her knight in shining Stokes. I think she'd go out with Ecklie before she'd go out with me" he confessed, his face aglow with an almost joyful humility.

Nina's jaw dropped, then she slapped her hand over her mouth.

"_Noooooooo..."_ she exclaimed in a throaty whisper.

"Yup" Greg assured her, shooting her a cynical look of his own.

"Are you gonna sit there and tell me you're really that surprised?" he asked, hanging his shaggy head, raising his dark eyebrows up into his forehead and holding them there.

Her eyes flickered with guilt as she slowly let her hands slide down off her face and into her lap.

"Okay, maybe no. Maybe I'm not what you'd call a fan of hers..." admitted Nina, sliding her hand over Greg's to give it a quick squeeze.

"But I'm still sorry your date sucked too" she said.

Nina sat there looking at him as she relaxed her back against the window behind her, little crinkles of sympathy forming atop her nose. Greg laughed at the sight of her, and upon seeing him do so she finally let out a shudder of a laugh herself. She sat up in her seat a little, staring around the room like she couldn't make heads or tails of it.

"Sanders, seriously, are we back in 1993? Is it time to climb up to the roof of the chem lab building with the other dweebs and talk about how overrated dating is and how we don't need the extra stress anyway? Time to break out the chem-kitchen glow jars and Bunsen burner cuisine?" Nina asked, her mouth wide open in mock astonishment.

Greg laughed through his nose.

"Don't start, you're freaking me out because I was just thinking that same thing. We're not that hard up, are we?" he retorted, vividly recalling many a Stanford weekend fueled by bitter bitching sessions about the harshness of dating realities, followed by the exchange of hopelessly romantic dating fantasies, over burnt Jiffy pop and cool ranch Doritos.

"Neil kept saying I was unsophisticated. He pushed me to order the wine at dinner and they didn't even have a wine list, so I just asked the waiter what the cheapest bottle was. Neil told me that was a _very_ unsophisticated thing to do. Then we had to wait for the line to thin out at the Palace Grand and yet again I came up unsophisticated because I said I wanted to check out that nifty little crime museum they opened up instead of the modern art gallery next door. I gave in and went with him to his _stupid_ modern art gallery and even _that_ wasn't good enough for him. The _display cases_ were unsophisticated, the _lighting fixtures_ were unsophisticated; meanwhile he kept calling the tour guide '_bro'_ whenever he had a question." shared Nina, wincing as she recollected, laughing increasingly harder.

Greg rolled his eyes so far up into his head he felt actual pain.

"How did you not cold clock that guy? Your dad would've" he remarked with renewed vigor, sitting straight up in his seat and glancing around for the waitress, more in the mood for coffee than ever.

"No he wouldn't! But he would've _threatened_ to whup him for sure" she grinned, seemingly very pleased at Greg's mention of her father.

"I was getting to that point. But I don't know, I'm so rusty with the whole dating thing I thought maybe I was being too harsh or something. When we went back into the Palace Grand there was this gaggle of girls he knew from somewhere, fawning all over him because they wanted his help getting in. He had his arms around all of them, I think he expected me to be impressed at his alpha male status or something. I don't think I need to tell you who he reminded me of. That's when I got the hell out of there" Nina said, a little inflection of regret trickling in at the end.

Greg felt a little dumbfounded any grown man could act that way, but in the same instant he wasn't surprised since it _was_ Neil '_Later Gator'_ Donovan they were talking about. Greg knew he himself had more than his share obnoxious moments piled up in his past, but he felt the crime lab's evidence clerk made him look like a saint in comparison.

"That guy really is a jackass. Sorry, but he really is" he heard himself say, growing increasingly impatient for the arrival of the waitress.

"Straight up" Nina agreed, sliding her coffee cup over to Greg, "Take it, I don't even want it. I just wanted to order it".

Greg slid the coffee closer, catching sight of the small photograph Nina had slipped beneath the saucer when he'd first arrived. He still wasn't sure if he should do it, but he went ahead and pulled it out , face down, into his hand. Nina saw this, and while she looked more than a little dubious about it, she did not stop him.

He flipped it over to behold the sight of a bride and a groom, both of their faces very familiar to him. There was Elliot 'Hot Shot' Mendes not looking all that much different from the last time Greg had seen him graduation week at Stanford; jet black hair in a preppy business cut and crystal blue eyes, all decked out in a crisp white tuxedo, capped teeth beaming so bright his grin was almost blinding.

Beside Mendes, with her cheek pressed against his, was Nina; her hair trained up into a tight, elegant knot with a miniature tiara of pearls encircling it, a fluffy veil shooting off the back. There were two puffs of white satin atop each of her shoulders, a plunging neckline covered in what looked to be thousands of shimmering pearls.

Greg stared and stared. He knew Nina had been married but he'd never once seen a wedding picture in all the time since she'd come to Vegas. It was the strangest thing for him to see her as a bride, almost as strange as seeing Mendes as a groom, and in his mind it seemed like they must have been dressed up for Halloween. Then he looked at her eyes, shinier and more cherubic than he would have ever thought possible, and he knew it was no costume party.

"Wow, you look beautiful" he said with quiet conviction, handing the photo back to her, smiling softly in her direction.

"I hated that dress actually, it was his mother's. I wanted to wear my mom's dress but Mrs. Mendes guilt tripped the hell out of me since she doesn't have any daughters. You can't see the bottom but it was just a big marshmallow bomb, I looked like the bride of Stay-Puft" Nina reminisced, giggling a little before her face turned wistful.

The voice of Ella Fitzgerald had taken up the mantel of holding court over the diner, singing "Walking By The River". As a waitress came out of the kitchen behind the counter, there came a burst of air carrying the scent of warm cinnamon and baking bread. Greg reveled in the homely security those scents provided, and the serene mood of that moment was the only thing which gave him enough nerve to ask Nina Sorrensen what he'd been wanting to ask her for a long time.

"You still love him?"

The instant he heard himself ask the question he panicked momentarily, wondering if he'd stepped over the line now the words were outside his head and out into the world. He wasn't Jim Brass and Nina wasn't a suspect, they were friends and friends came with boundaries. Greg still wasn't sure where all of those boundaries lay when it came to Nina, all he knew is that he didn't want to make her cry.

He was still curious to hear the answer. He had yet to get so close to another human being outside his direct bloodline and still had questions that could never be answered in a book or at a lecture. Greg was relieved to see Nina did not cry, he was quietly gratified to see she was more than willing to answer him.

"No, Greg. No I don't. I don't know if you'll get this or not, but I think I'm still getting over the guy I _thought_ he was rather than the guy he turned out to _actually be._ You get what I mean? It sounds like such a bad cliché but I was so sure I knew how my life was going to go, because when you get married you make all these _plans_. You get this whole big future. When everything fell apart, it hit the fan _so_ damn fast. It was like that whole future and the whole idea of who I thought he was got blown up with the marriage..." she explained, kicking her sandals off beneath the table and tucking her legs beneath her in a cramped version of the lotus position.

"I have no idea what _happened_ to that guy, I keep wondering if he ever really was that guy at all. I can't even imagine anyone new being _the one _and I don't even know if I can even think in those kind of terms ever again. This friggin' picture is like all I have left of that idea of him. Sometimes it's like the only thing I have left of who I was before I got divorced. Do you get that, or am I talking Sorrensen crazy talk?"

She pulled her bottom lip into her mouth, so utterly naked in her honesty as she fiddled with a loose thread on the waistband of her pants. Her big eyes seemed to grow rounder and bigger as she looked to Greg for understanding, though not a tear fell from them.

He couldn't believe it, but he understood perfectly.

"No, you're not crazy. I get it..."

Greg absent mindedly grabbed a napkin off the table and crushed it up in his fist, so many of his stored up thoughts breaking the locks he'd created for them; flying around like a swarm of bees inside his head. There were perfect sentences lost in the shuffle somewhere, ones he tried desperately to get a grip on.

The old woman in her trailer, how she'd gone to bed that night counting on one particular future to be waiting ahead of her and how she had no choice but to accept an entirely new and uncertain one through no fault of her own. How she was going to be okay because she had a family that loved her.

Greg Sanders, the fun loving lab rat extraordinaire of Las Vegas who woke up one day to find he had turned into a bona-fide CSI. The guy who'd spent so much time creating pedestals he hadn't even bothered to properly decorate his apartment or find himself a girlfriend that was anything but a fantasy.

There was so much he wanted to tell her.

A young, red headed waitress appeared then, splatters of ketchup dotting the front of her pink and blue uniform. She used a little yellow rag tucked into the pocket of her white apron to wipe away the tic-tac-toe board and without a blink she grabbed Greg's little paper star and crumpled it up with the rest of used napkins.

Greg felt keenly frustrated at her arrival, he was so afraid she was stepping over a moment he was never going to get back.

"Sorry it took me so long, the take out calls don't stop until way after breakfast..." the waitress explained apologetically, dropping Nina's check upon the table and posing her pen to start a new one for Greg.

"What can I getcha?".

As Nina produced money from her purse, Greg was overcome with the same acute feelings of separation anxiety he had experienced in the lab hallway when Sara left, only now they were kicking him around ten times harder. He just couldn't let her go home, and he knew he couldn't home yet either.

It was still too dark outside.

He spied the owner's wife setting out a pair of fresh baked fruit pies atop two glass cake stands, and hence spied a possible remedy to the situation.

He poked Nina gently with his finger.

"Hey, look over there. A slice of that'll fix you right up. My treat Neens" Greg offered, feeling even more antsy as she slipped her sandals back on.

"Awe Greg, I dunno, I think I'm in for the night. I only came here to run away from the dirty dishes in my sink when I went home and now I think it's probably time I face the music" she said, tucking her photograph into her wallet before pulling out a ten dollar bill.

"No, come on. We'll have pie and then maybe we can head over to Cuckoo Clubs for some putt-putt. They're doing this new midnight light show thing from sundown to sun-up on Fridays, the golf balls glow in the dark. We'll putt til dawn. It'll be awesome" pushed Greg, happy that he had her blocked into the booth.

Nina told the waitress to keep the change on her two dollar check, and shot Greg a look that was half guilty, half cynical.

"Sanders, seriously? Pity pie and pity putt-putt?" she asked, tilting her messy head to the side.

"It's not _pity_ Sorrensen, it's just a good idea. You'll thank me for it." assured Greg, turning back to the waiting waitress and ignoring Nina's attempts to thwart him by tugging the sleeve of his sport coat.

"We'll take two slices of the apple pie"

As the waitress scribbled down the order, Greg felt a surge of energy shoot through him out of nowhere and he threw his arm over the back of Nina's shoulders. He gave her a shake, and even though she cringed a little in her seat he managed to shake a giggle out of her.

"Anything else?" asked the waitress.

Greg smirked, and he shot Nina a mischievous look of conspiracy before returning his attentions back to their server.

"What would you say is the most _sophisticated_ drink you serve here?" he asked, flashing her the toothiest of toothy grins.

Nina kicked him under the table and screwed her eyes shut.

The waitress looked confused.

"I don't know. Cherry Coke?"

Greg's theatrical instincts were out in full force as he pressed his lips together and furrowed his eyebrows in deep thought. He tapped his fingertip to his mouth a few times, then he nodded emphatically.

"Mmh, Cherry Coke sounds fantastic. We'll take two of those please" he said.

The waitress regarded him with a cocked eyebrow for a moment, thanked Nina for her tip, and headed off toward her next waiting patrons.

Greg beamed at Nina, obnoxiously happy, and Nina tried twisting her face out of a smile.

"God Sanders, you really are a cheese doodle" she remarked, her dark hair hanging down in shiny waves on either side of her face as she shook her head at him.

Greg saw her cherubic eyes had come running back to her face in full force, and it inspired a keen sense of gratification inside him. Hence, he felt he had earned the right to be a little cocky.

"But you love me" he announced with conviction, dropping his palm gently atop her head to mess up her hair.

She kicked him one more time.

"I do love you. And I'll eat your pie, but I'm not doing your glow in the dark putt-putt. Mess my hair all you want y'ole cuss" Nina declared as she combed her tresses with her fingers, taking on the tone of her Texan father as if that would illustrate just how serious she was.

Greg wasn't going to have it.

"We'll see" he said, somewhat mysteriously, wondering if he still had his discount card for Cuckoo Clubs in his wallet.

Nina rolled her eyes at him, taking the opportunity to wind her hair up atop her head, giggling in spurts. Greg yanked out his Gooey Bunz punch card, his worn out LVU library card, his rarely used gym membership. He finally had his fingers wrapped around the prize, when Nina suddenly grabbed his hands.

"No! You know what?" she asked, her crystal eyes bouncing all over the place like they did whenever she was just on the verge of something either brilliant or crazy.

"What?" inquired Greg, getting that adventurous Stanford feeling again, his chest fluttering just slightly as he awaited her answer.

"I know what! But we've gotta get that order to go" Nina informed him, inadvertently kicking Greg as she scrambled around in her seat to sneak a peek up at the sky outside.

"Wait, wait. _What?_" Greg asked again, peering through the blinds and quickly catching sight of some dark clouds illuminated by the bright lights of Las Vegas.

Nina flopped her butt back down in her seat, her cheeks flushed and her teeth bared in a grin of near perfect contentment.

"It'll fix us right up. Now go change our order to take out" instructed Nina, haughty now and purposely teasing him with suspense.

Greg felt a massive wave of relief come over him, and he wished he knew how to thank her without sounding weird.

He just saluted her instead.

"_Sir!_"

He hung on a moment of shared anticipation with her, unsure whether or not she had it in mind to get up to something stupid but not caring one way or the other. He just wanted to stay with her and keep the momentum going.

Maybe even tell her things, if ever he figured out which words to say.

Once the moment had passed, he stuffed his wallet back into his jeans, stood up, and grabbed his Dempsey's bag. He was straightening the sleeves on his coat and peering around in search of the waitress when he felt a hand come crashing down on his ass in one doozy of a slap.

He didn't start, he didn't whirl around or jump. He simply stood there, eyes screwed shut with a closed mouth grin, laughing through his nose. He opened his eyes and spied a particularly amused looking female patron smirking at him from her spot at the lunch counter. He gave her a polite little wave before slowly turning to face his waiting friend.

There was no doubt about it, the girl was extremely proud of herself and Greg couldn't deny she had all the right in the world to be so.

"Told ya you'd pay for it" she said simply, her eyes glittering with wicked glee.

Greg echoed his earlier actions, and bowed decorously before her.

"Very, _very_ well played" he said.


	13. The Light & The Music

The roof of the crime lab was uncharacteristically cool and dry, the breeze sweeping down from the mountain ranges a welcome reprieve from the balmy nights that seemed to go on forever. The stars were peeking in and out behind swift clouds traveling above the valley city, as was the bright silvery moon. Saturday morning was fast approaching but the lights of Las Vegas did not seem ready to quit their Friday night party just yet; they just danced and sparkled on tirelessly, lighting the way for anyone steely enough to keep up with them.

Greg scraped the last bits of apple pie from the bottom of his take-out box, taking in a deep breath of fresh air, enjoying the atmosphere from beneath the shelter of the tall helipad located there. He stretched out on a rickety chaise lounge chair that was part of set considered shared property for any crime lab employee wishing to work on their tan up there during break time, or catch a breather before some intense workload sent them insane.

Nina's crappy boom box sat atop one of many black starbursts of ash permanently blasted into the concrete from past explosion experiments, plugged into a long orange extension cord connected to an auxiliary power outlet. Reception for the oldies station was not much better on the roof than it had been inside, due to the cloud cover and the fact her preferred station was broadcasting miles away in Pahrump. "Down In The Boondocks" by Billie Joe Royal played from beneath a heavy blanket of white noise, but for the time being that was good enough for both of them.

The two of them sat in comfortable silence eating their spoils from Frank's out of Styrofoam containers, sucking Cherry Coke from straws stabbed through the lids of paper cups, staring out over the grandeur of the glittering city below. They had both sunk into their chairs and quickly disappeared inside their respective heads; with the radio struggling to play its song, their eyes were captured by the sky above and by the spotlight beams shooting up from the ground to dance across the gathering clouds.

Greg took a sip from his soda to wash down the dry pie crust, sighing with great contentment as he stole a glance over at Nina. A breath of wind whipped up the wisps of hair around her face as she licked crumbs from her fingers and stuffed her emptied box into the paper bag it came in, the lights of Vegas reflecting like Christmas in her eyes.

Greg sighed, thinking her notion to climb to the rooftop was definitely a much better one than his Cuckoo-Clubs idea. Putt-putt would have meant noise, and activity, and distraction. There he had quiet, seclusion, and room to swim around inside his mind without feeling like it might drown him.

"Remember Half Moon Bay?" he asked out of nowhere, letting the filters of his mind fall away without a fight.

Nina rose to her feet, hugging herself as she began to stroll between the thick steel reinforced pillars supporting the helipad above.

"Wow. Haven't thought about that in a long time, but yeah, of course. Why?" she asked him with an inquisitive glance, before furrowing her eyebrows with an admonishing stare toward the increasingly fuzzy reception coming over the speakers.

Greg shrugged, cramming his emptied pie box into the garbage bag and walking over to join her.

"I miss it I guess." he said simply, zipping his hoodie and buttoning his coat against the growing chill.

"Yeah, I do too sometimes" she admitted, glancing back at him with a soft smile before disappearing behind a pillar.

He quickly followed her.

"You're happy here, right? I mean, you're not thinking about leaving or anything, right?" he asked her, eager to hear her answer.

She reappeared from behind yet another pillar, eyes staring off into infinity as she pondered. She stopped beside the low concrete wall, letting her weight fall against it, looking up at Greg as if she could see directly inside his head.

"No, I'm not leaving. And,...I'm _getting_ happier" she answered, her voice low but steady.

Greg got the sensation of everything around him suddenly falling away, leaving nothing but the sky, the radio, and his old friend. He walked up and took his place beside her, both of them resting their elbows on the wall and staring up at the undulating clouds.

"You're not thinking of leaving, are you?" Nina asked, digging into the pocket of her track pants to retrieve a crumpled pack of cigarettes and a lighter.

Greg sighed, picking at the grit inside a gouge in the wall, listening to a low rumble of thunder rolling in from the horizon.

Without thinking twice, he snatched her cigarette away before she could light it, crushed it in his fingers, and tossed it down into the void below; ignoring the indignant grimace she was boring into the side of his face.

"Nah, staying put" he said with a scrunch of his nose, peering over to offer her an impish smile.

Her eyes squeezed into two half moons at that, if a bit begrudgingly. She paused for a moment, looking into him once again, and while she remained smiling there was seriousness in her eyes.

"What about happy? Are you happy Sanders?"

Greg inhaled sharply upon hearing that, resting his arms upon the wall and dropping his chin into the fold of them. He exhaled through his puffed out lips, recalling Sara's words of wisdom about Nina and trying to remind himself how much he knew they were true.

"I am. I love my job and I love this city. I guess it's just...getting harder now. I mean, remember us taking off to Half Moon and camping out in the caves like we were big rebels, because my dad was riding my ass about grades and your dad wouldn't stop pushing you to go into law enforcement? Like it was the worst shit in the world? Remember that?" Greg recalled, looking over at Nina, eager to hear her talk about all the stories and memories he had thus far been pushing her not to.

She giggled in apparent spite of herself, nodding emphatically.

"I remember. I remember you were like _'My dad is such a jerk'_. That was the worst thing I think I ever heard you say about him at that point and you couldn't even say _jerk_ without turning red" Nina recalled, her voice raising in pitch under the force of her laughter.

Greg laughed with her.

"Right, and you made a list of all the laws you could break that would only result in fines, and you were gonna break them all just to piss your dad off" he reminded her, chortling into the sleeve of his coat.

Her laughter burst forth from deep within her chest then, and went echoing across the roof.

"Mmh, I thought I was so hard core. And we were _so_ bad ass dragging our text books down there to cram for exams during our big act of anarchy, weren't we?" she asked, laying her head down upon her arms as if they were pillows.

"Yeah, life was _so hard_..." joked Greg, shaking his head as he contemplated his next words, looking up into the ever brightening morning sky as if to find the security to say them.

"Now it seems like some kind of lost utopia or something. I keep wanting to take a ride out there but I know it won't be the same, y'know? I keep thinking about what Grissom said once: '_The happy golden years of our lives are all around us, but never to be golden until at once they become our past"._ He's always saying stuff like that, not sure I even hear him half the time anymore, but that one's been glued to my brain for weeks. I mean, I don't actually think things _were_ easier back then, I guess with all that's going on now it just _seems _that way" confessed Greg, traveling through his mind in effort to get a handle on the perfect sentences he found there less than an hour earlier at the diner.

Nina lay on her arms, smiling up at him almost maternally. She bit her bottom lip, concern flitting across her brows, and reached up to brush some hair out of his eyes.

Greg trembled, only very quietly.

"All that's going on? Do you mean that call out in the desert?" she asked, gently.

Greg nodded.

"Yeah, that one kinda kicked my ass a little bit" he told her in no uncertain terms, sighing some air out through his lips.

"Do you wanna talk about it?" she inquired, with caution in her tone, as if she were prepared for a refusal.

"No. I mean, I would but I had a talk with Sara, it helped a lot" Greg explained, feeling an awkward sensation of showing favoritism.

He wondered if she might take offense, and was comforted to see her face awash with relief.

"Good, I'm glad to hear that. I don't know if it will help, but even after my dad was on the force for fifteen years he still had cases that kicked his ass and messed with his head. Denny too. They think I don't get it, but I do. Getting them to talk is impossible though, so I just learned to cook instead. You wouldn't believe how therapeutic a chicken pot pie is for those guys" Nina relayed with candor, asking him to smile with her by twinkling her eyes.

"Oh I believe it" Greg told her with a firm nod.

"It's good to have someone to talk to, though. I know I probably talk _too_ much, but I dunno, everybody always guesses my dad's age to be so much older than he actually is and I just don't think his job would have aged him as much if he'd talked more. I'm glad you're talking to someone, it'll keep you young. I swear. I know you hate when I tell stories, and I don't mean to be a pain in the ass, Sanders. I think I've been feeling nostalgic for all of that too lately. Like what Mr. Grissom said about transitional items from childhood, how a lot of adults still fall back on baby blankets and stuffed animals when they're in the middle of a crisis period and use them to cope until they're through it? I guess it's like that. You get me?"

She waited for an answer and Greg didn't hesitate on that one.

"Hell yeah. Whenever Papa O was having a hard time, he'd be coming out with stories left and right about being a little upstart in Norway and convincing tourists to toss him a few Krone for his _special_ guided tour of Oslo. Or how he met Nana and pestered her every day on her walk to work to get her to go out with him. He'd always tell it like the cousins and I never heard it before, and we'd act like we never did, just because it made him happy. I just figured that was standard grandpa stuff and I guess it is, but I think when the shit hit the fan that stuff helped him keep going and now I really _get_ that" shared Greg, thinking he was a moron for not having thought about that more in the first place.

"I get it too. I know I'll probably wake up one day waxing friggin' nostalgic about this moment _right now_ and I keep trying to think positive, like the best years are yet to come and all that, it's just been...challenging. I feel like I don't have the moxie I used to. Sometimes I feel like an old lady" related Nina with abject honesty, standing up and rubbing her shoulders.

Greg drew closer to her, close enough to let his weight fall against her in a light, friendly shove.

"You're not an _old lady_, come on. Are you _wearing_ orthopedic shoes? Are you _playing_ canasta with the garden club?" he teased, fluttering his eyelashes.

"_No_, but no one cards me anymore when I buy alcohol. Not that I buy alcohol a whole hell of a lot but when I do, they don't card me. And they call me _ma'am_. I'm a _ma'am _Greg" Nina explained, bulging her eyes out for effect.

Greg watched as crinkles formed above her nose and something akin to a pout formed on her plump lips, so genuine in her distress. He laughed heartily at the ridiculousness of her ever thinking she could be old, and he laughed at himself for entertaining equally ridiculous thoughts about himself very recently.

Then he laughed at how ridiculous Papa Olaf would think they both were, and how pleased he would be at his correctness on that assertion.

"It's not funny!" she protested, twisting her lips around in a tight pucker to keep from smiling again.

"It is, though, short round. It really is. I was in Dempsey's last week and I looked at this new wrinkle cream for guys. Then I freaked out that I was doing it, and bought the new Firewalker album to show myself I'm still hip and with it" confessed Greg, giving a wry smile as he pointed to himself self-effacingly with both thumbs.

"You _did_ not!" Nina exclaimed in a throaty cry, her mouth agape.

"Affirmative. But you tell anyone that and I'll _kill_ you" Greg warned with good nature.

"I won't tell. But you don't need wrinkle cream, Greg. You're the youngest thirty-one year old I know. If I didn't know any better I wouldn't think you were a day over twenty-five" Nina said, her tone injected with wonder rather than empty flattery.

It was one of the simplest statements he'd heard all day, so Greg was amazed at how much better it made him feel and how quickly it made him feel it.

It made him feel like he was opening up, like the stitches of a seam running vertically down his body were popping loose one by one.

It made him feel generous.

"Yeah, well, the same goes for you, kid. And don't take this the wrong way but to hell with Mendes, and to hell with Neil Donovan too. I don't know who you were before you got divorced, I don't know what it feels like to have that happen, but who you are now seems fine to me. If you didn't have moxie you wouldn't have survived. That's _scientific fact_. Like you said, the best years are yet to come. Trust your old pal Sanders, I'm psychic remember" Greg said with conviction, wiggling his fingers to emphasize the spooky veracity of his statement.

Nina's cheeks flushed a little pink then, and she squinted as she tilted her head.

"Yeah?" she asked, simply and truly.

"Yes ma'am"

He nudged her shoulder with his fist, and she nudged him back. She sparkled at him as she walked past, hugging herself once more as she strolled along, lightly stroking the pillars with her long fingers as she weaved in and out.

Greg felt an ache tug on his chest as he watched her walk away from him, hoping she was not preparing to leave him and go home. His throat tightened as he tried envisioning the next words he would say to her, only to come up against another obstinate roadblock of fog in his mind.

It hurt not to know what he wanted to say, but it was an entirely different hurt than the one that had been following him around since the Wilkes case. Rather than feeling like the pain of saying goodbye at the airport, it was like having to wait at the gate for an arrival that may or may not ever get there. It was an almost pleasant sort of pain, and so unlike the crushing threat of the darkness.

Nina disappeared behind a pillar once more, imbuing Greg with a wholly illogical fear he might never see her again. With baited breath he waited, and at last she finally reappeared, turning her head toward him with smiling eyes.

Then he inhaled with a shudder in his chest, the coolness of the air shocking him awake again.

Before he knew it his eyes just locked on to hers, one of those weird moments that came out of nowhere with her sometimes, like an odd snare he couldn't shake loose. A particular thought went floating around the recesses of his mind, an impulse that had not quite found its way to action.

It was telling him that he really _could_ kiss her if he wanted to. It perplexed him to think this was true, it seemed so utterly implausible somehow. Kissing Sorrensen in the middle of the crime lab rooftop where they could easily get caught by one of their colleagues was a crazy notion and he knew it. Still, the sheer impossibility of it all made the idea that much more thrilling.

He watched as Nina knelt beside the radio to fiddle with the antenna, groaning at it in her singsong voice, calling it a demon. He watched her biting down on her lip as she fought with the radio, and he noticed her shivering against the growing cold in nothing but her tank top.

Without so much as a second thought about it, he knew exactly what had to be done.

He went over to his seat and pulled the Dempsey's bag out from beneath it. He produced his favorite gray hoodie, the one which had been like a second skin to him, and brought it over.

She paid him no mind as she continued her swearing unabated, and didn't even seem aware of his presence as he lowered himself down beside her. He placed his free hand on hers, managed to cease her growing violence toward her boom box, and without a word he helped her to her feet. He held the jacket open for her, giving it a little shake for effect.

Nina looked impressed.

"Where did you get that? Did you like, _knit that_ when I wasn't looking or something?" she inquired with fascination, looking around as if to spot a sewing machine, eagerly slipping her arms into the sleeves.

Greg placed his hands atop her shoulders and turned her around, taking liberty to zip the jacket closed for her and pull the hood up over her messy head.

"Eagle Scout rule number one?..." he began, eyeing her with confidence in his dark brown eyes, reaching into his interior pocket and holding up his mix CD for display,...

"Always be prepared".

Without further ado, he dropped his CD into the tray and pressed 'play', standing up straight with a smile of great satisfaction.

"Oh you're _good. _And to think I was worried about you. I should have remembered you've always had a knack for landing on your feet" she declared, giggling as she returned his favor by straightening the collar on his coat and smoothing down the lapels.

"That I do, Miss Sorrensen, that I do" he said, tilting his head back ever so slightly and curling the side of his mouth into his cheek as he took her by the hand.

He ignored the tiny drops of condensation falling from the sky and lead her to the farthest corner of the crime lab roof, the one which faced the striking facade of the Excalibur hotel and the vividly lit tower peaks of the storybook castle beside it.

She hesitated, digging her heels into the concrete and tugging on his sleeve.

"Wait, what the hell are you doing? It's starting to rain dodo" she pointed out, her hair flying around wildly now they were in the open air without obstruction.

"You said you haven't been dancing in ages. There's a flat surface that looks a hell of a lot like a dance floor. You do the math" he told her directly, leaving no room for arguments as he ran around behind her and pushed her toward his chosen destination.

She screeched, and Greg could feel the stubbornness in her limbs yield under the force of her rollicking laughter. He ran around in front of her once more, playing the part of the classic dancing fool as he clapped his hands twice and put an invisible flower in his teeth. He bowed demurely, then yanked her into his arms with purposeful clumsiness.

He realized, with great excitement, that he was officially flirting with her. He was going to ask himself if he should stop, but that was before he figured out his impulses were not going to let him care about the answer one way or another.

"CSI or no CSI, you're still a dork" Nina said in such a way it was truly a compliment, as Greg tossed her gingerly from side to side.

Then, like another call from the great beyond, he heard the sound of Hendrix come flooding across the rooftop as _The Wind Cries Mary_ began.

Like living out a memory of a time he'd already seen come and go, he slipped one arm around her waist and held her hand with the other. The first few guitar riffs were simple and brief, and so he simply swayed from side to side with her. Once the real heart and soul of the song began, it wasn't difficult to fall into a two-step rhythm with her.

She followed his lead with precision, swaying when he wanted her to sway, spinning when he wanted her to spin. The rumble of thunder seemed far away as he watched her put on her best rock star face and lip sync the words to him. He returned the favor, taking on the face he liked to think was a mix between Elvis Presley and James Bond, mouthing the words right back as he swept her to and fro.

He felt the impulse to kiss her darting out from the dark corners for a moment, sprinting on weightless heels to the epicenter of his reflexes. He hovered closer to her and she did not back away; he felt like he'd become completely drunk within nanoseconds upon catching the sweet cherry blossom scent of her. He felt himself melt away, the urge to respond to that impulse growing ever stronger.

He couldn't swear but it certainly looked like her eyes were begging him to do it, begging him to let the impulse win the race to the finish line. It was coming over him, faster and faster.

His arm was a disembodied limb with a mind of its own as he felt it slipping tighter around her waist, his fingers floating so tentatively on the curve of her. He felt the warmth of her grow closer as she leaned into him, hovering on the brink of him just as he hovered on the brink of her .

Then, all of a sudden, he wanted her so bad it hurt.

She exposed her neck, her head tilting ever so slightly backward. He felt her breath on him, her lips appearing to plump as they parted, her eyes growing rounder with each passing second.

He felt as if he were tumbling when he finally gave in, slipping his free hand around the back of her head as he pressed his lips to hers.

It was instant and perfect. The feeling of kissing her aroused every last inch of his body, the sound of her breathing hard in perfect harmony with him made Greg want to soak her into every pore somehow. He heard her let out a muted coo as she clutched at the nape of his neck and Greg swept her up into his arms, so consumed that he could not kiss her hard enough or get enough of her to feel satisfied in that moment.

When he closed his eyes Greg's mind was bursting with visceral images of her that were almost like snapshots of things he'd kept buried inside him without even knowing. The easy pleasure he received from all the years of her friendship, the deep comfort he felt in their playful banter, the odd sense of pride he felt when anyone in the lab spoke of her with fondness. He opened his eyes just to see her, just to ride the moment and revel in the reality of making out with that incredible vision in his mind.

He just wanted more, he wanted to fall to the ground with her and press his body against her. He felt her nails dig gently into his hair, then he felt them dig gently into the small of his back. He let out a loud groan of pleasure, with Nina following his lead not a second later.

He savored the sounds of her every whimper, his whole body pulsing as he grabbed her ass and dove upon her neck.

"Oh god, oh..._crap_" Nina was heard to say, seemingly out the great beyond, and Greg felt utterly dazed when she broke the embrace.

Nina shook out her hands nervously, her chest still heaving.

"This is wrong" she told him breathlessly, like a little schoolgirl being asked to push someone off the swings.

"Is it?" Greg asked honestly, unable to stop staring at her with what felt like insatiable thirst and hunger.

"Stop that, we're _at work_" she reprimanded him, nipping at her fingertips.

Nina pointed at a nearby placard emblazoned with the logo of the Las Vegas Crime Lab, and Greg was surprised to realize he'd forgotten all about it.

"I just..." he trailed off in a sleepy tone, trying to shake himself awake, trying to stop his body from demanding he indulge his carnal desires immediately. He had not felt so excited by a woman in so long.

"It's the stress, we need...water or something..." Nina suggested, dragging her eyes off of him as she stomped away toward her cup from Frank's.

Greg tried hard to control himself but between the passionate exchange and the lateness of the hour, he couldn't even begin to imagine how to do so.

He felt like a man possessed as he followed her with his boots pounding on the pavement beneath him, feeling shocked that he never before noticed how exceptionally sexy her curves really were. He caught her as she went to reach for her drink, turning her around to face him with what felt like superhuman strength.

He kissed her again, harder than before, pushing his weight against her while kneading her shoulders with his thumbs. She did not even try to resist at first, yanking him closer with her fingers wrapped around the belt loops on the back of his pants, groaning from deep within her chest.

"Picking up where we left off at Half Moon Bay..." Greg murmured in a heated whisper, running his hands down her body, slipping them beneath the fabric of her shirt to massage the bare skin at her waist.

He went for her neck again, and once again this move inspired her to push him away.

"Oh holy crap we need to quit it, we're gonna get _fired_" she said with exasperation, though Greg could not tell if she aimed that at him or at herself.

"I don't _care_" he told her with just a touch of annoyance, aching to kiss her one more time.

She bit her lip and furrowed her dark eyebrows at him, staggering just the slightest bit as she calmed her breathing. She lifted her drink from the ground, tearing the lid off before she took a moment to stare Greg down.

"Sanders, stop that" Nina reprimanded him.

He could plainly see she was trying to be firm with him, but at that very moment he just found her way too adorable to be taken seriously. He stood there, doped and dumb, smiling at her with only the naughtiest looking intentions steaming off his dark brown eyes.

Nina took a deep breath and held it.

Then, with deft movement, she proceeded to flick her wrist, sending a splash of freezing cold ice and water over Greg's face.

He shivered instinctively, staring back at her in shock.

"I'm sorry I did that, but you have to snap out of it and I mean _right now_" Nina told him, digging her cigarettes from her pocket before splashing herself too.

Greg felt the startling impact Nina seemed to desire, the icy prickles on his skin forcing him awake. Thoughts of failing to do his job properly reentered his mind, as did the disquieting visions of Grissom's patented look of disapproval. There was also the thought of Ecklie's unmatched ability to get him shitcanned in one blink of his beady eyes. A pair of eyes that were probably wandering around inside the lab beneath them that very second, just looking for a reason to fire somebody's ass for insubordination.

He felt very much the irresponsible public servant just then, the kind he abhorred for their lack of self control.

The pang of guilt quelled his desire, but not the ache.

"Nina, I'm sorry I just-"

"No, it's fine. It's been a long day. We haven't hydrated enough, dehydration can make even the sanest people do crazy things. Like that guy who shot out the tires on the ice cream truck over in Reno during the heat wave last year" Nina pointed out, gulping down the last of the liquid in her cup before abruptly lighting her cigarette and sitting down beside a pillar beneath the helipad.

Greg used the sleeves of his jacket to dry his face, then he slumped down beside her.

Hendrix played on, oblivious to the unexpected turn of events that had unfolded around the sounds of his guitar. There they sat, thunder rumbling louder in the sky, Greg squeezing moisture from his jacket while Nina puffed greedily on her cigarette.

He thought once again of Half Moon Bay, and the bonfire that took place a week before they were going to leave the halls of Stanford forever and strike out on their own. Their last hurrah, dancing around the flames; Greg in his blue swim shorts with the glow-in-the-dark skulls all over them, Nina in her black retro bikini that was one size too small. Greg with his flaming cherry red hair and half-assed goatee, Nina with her electric blue curls and newly pierced navel.

How they had both been the butt of jokes after becoming fairly intoxicated on two vodka cocktails apiece, how they both ran off to their favorite cave to escape the growing aggression of Mendes and his jocky cohorts to discuss their wide open futures for the millionth time.

For the last time.

Nina, how she was going to Africa to finish the work her mother never got a chance to, how she was going to single handedly put an end to the corruption in the almost non-existent police force and give the people all the crime fighting technology it would take to bring them the peaceful existence they deserved.

Greg, how he was going to New York to become the greatest music critic the city had ever seen, how he was going to pound the clubs every night to find every single act the populous needed to know about, how he might even become a rock star himself if he had the time. No matter what his parents said, he was going to do it.

That night, how the two of them had huddled beneath a blanket before a shoddy little campfire of their own, repeating over and over how certain this all was. How there was insecurity and doubt trickling in ever so slightly behind their words, though neither would let the other believe anything could possibly go wrong in their plans.

How they raised their bottles of cheap alcoholic lemonade and toasted all the members of the Stanford Chem Lab Brigade one by one, before finally toasting each other. That moment when something strange went floating on the air around them, and how just a few minutes later they were writhing in the sand together, carried away on the kind of passion that comes so easily in times of heightened emotion. How unexpected it all was, and how sure Greg had been that he actually _was_ going to succeed in losing his virginity before leaving Stanford after all.

She had stopped him then, too. The Sorrensen voice of reason that could never be silenced no matter how much alcohol she had in her system, telling him their friendship had meant more to her than she had ever told him before that, and how much she thought she was going to need it in the coming years. Greg had pushed through his sexual frustration, as difficult as that had been, and realized she had a point.

With that, they had parted ways a week and a half later and Greg promised to email her faithfully at least once a month. They had said goodbye, confident they had done the right thing in preserving such a precious friendship.

Then seven more years went by, and they had lost each other.

All of this tumbled through Greg's mind in a flash as he sat beside Nina on the roof of the crime lab, idly catching stray raindrops in his palm. He looked at her feet, then at her legs, until finally he looked at her face.

Sorrensen, sucking the hell out of her cigarette between bites on her fingernails, staring off in such a way it was obvious she was remembering the very same things he was.

"I'm such an _ass"_ Greg heard himself say, and he hoped she might understand he meant it in more ways than one.

Two fat tears ran down each of her cheeks.

"Sometimes" she acquiesced, a tremble of a giggle escaping her chest.

"I'm sorry Nina. I don't know what the hell got into me" he said, running his fingers through his hair, wishing for more caffeine to wake his brain.

"Christ, Sanders, you're lonely. _I'm lonely._ No mystery there" she declared without hesitation, smashing her cigarette out beneath the sole of her sandal.

Greg heard a statement rolling around in his head, and now that his filters were back in full force he thought it was probably a bad idea to consider saying it aloud.

Then Sara's words came back to him once again, how Nina understood more than he thought, and then he just didn't care.

"I haven't gotten any in awhile" he told her plainly.

Nina wiped her eyes, and laughed aloud.

"Yeah, I hear ya" she replied, giggling and crying at the same time.

Greg put his arm around her, and held her close.

"Awe Sanders, don't think I'm not interested. It's not that, it's just I'm not sure I could handling sleeping with anyone right now, never mind sleeping with you. I just, I know I sound like a broken record from 1994, but I need your friendship more than anything right now. I might be full of myself, but I mean, I think you need mine too right now. You know what I mean?"

She looked over at him with big eyes, chewing her fingernail with anticipation of his answer.

He pulled her finger out of her mouth, and held her hand.

"You're not a broken record Sorrensen. If you didn't say it, I would have" said Greg, pulling the radio beneath the shelter of the helipad as the morning sky opened up with rain. He clicked the back button and put Hendrix on repeat, as he felt he might go crazy otherwise.

"I _was_ thinking about leaving, you kinda freaked me out when you asked actually. I was thinking about it, I don't know if Alicia will leave swing shift at all now and I still feel so out of whack about everything. You're here though, and having your friendship back has been exactly what I think I've needed. You just..._get it._ You've always just _gotten it._ Whether it was advanced biochem that had me banging my head against a wall or why I feel the way I feel, you _just_ get it. It's why you're brilliant at what you do, and it's why you're-"

She trailed off there, biting her bottom lip to keep it from quivering as she drew in a deep breath.

"Why I'm what?" Greg asked with true interest.

Nina looked away.

"It's why you're my best friend, dodo. And why I kind of never want to sleep with you._ Ever._ I just got you back, I don't want to screw that up for a little bit of sex. I didn't then, and I _really_ don't want to now" she said.

She hung her head, looking almost ashamed of herself. Greg wondered why she should, seeing as she was one of the only people he knew that shared how she felt so willingly and without remorse.

He searched her words, letting each statement repeat two or three times so he could carefully consider the tone and cadence.

Then it hit him.

_Best friend._

He did get it, and he got it immediately.

"Nina, and I mean this on the friendship tip,...I love you. I think Sara's been trying in her Sidle way to tell me that I take you for granted way too much. And I do. I always have. I'm not going to do it anymore, Nina. And I'm never going to sleep with you either. No matter how much you plead, no matter how much you beg. I'm not gonna do it, because you're my best friend too" Greg told her, with mock grief in his tone as he closed his eyes and solemnly shook his head.

He opened one eye, and there Nina sat narrowing her glossy eyes at him, her expression joyfully sarcastic.

"Thank you..." she said, softly and gratefully.

Then she scrunched up her face at him.

"You jerk" she giggled, shoving him over so hard he tumbled out from beneath the helipad into a nearby puddle.

The bright beams of light peeking down through the clouds, along with the biting cold of the rain caused every molecule in Greg's body to come alive. Nina sat with her hands over her face, laughing with genuine apology in her crystal eyes.

Greg listened as his song played on, the bridge of which was fast approaching. As far as Greg and his exceptional music appreciation senses were concerned, it was the best part of the entire song. No lyrics, just a set of easygoing riffs that were both longing and hopeful, depending on what mood you were in.

In that moment, he felt hopeful and rode that feeling like a bronco. He gave no room for protest as he sprinted over to Nina and yanked her into his arms. He ignored her screeching as he carried her back out into the open expanse of the roof, the rain pouring down even harder than before.

Nina went to run but Greg swept her up again, squeezing her tightly and lifting her right off the ground in spite of her girly cries.

"You're already soaked! There's no point stopping now!" Greg called, unwilling to let her go before the song was over.

"You _want_ hypothermia? You _want_ to ruin your fancy hair cut?" she shouted, sounding strangely amused at the notion.

"Maybe I do!" he retorted, quashing his physiological urge to shiver and pulling the warmth of her closer than ever.

"If Ecklie comes up here and sees this we're _so fired!"_ Nina helpfully pointed out, perpetrating an exercise in futility as she repeatedly attempted to wipe her face on the sleeve of the gray hoodie Greg had given her.

The hoodie that now belonged to her, even if she didn't realize it yet.

"No way, Ecklie never goes out in the rain. He'll melt if water hits him" Greg cracked, feeling no need to mention that joke had originated from the mouth of Catherine Willows.

"Just go with it!" he shouted in encouragement, dipping her down almost completely vertical.

"Okay then, psychic boy! Out with it! Tell me my future!" challenged Nina, light as a feather on the tips of her toes as she spun once more.

Greg clutched her close to him, and closed his eyes. He continued to move with her, furrowing his eyebrows with dramatic flare as if tapping into very supernatural forces.

"I see...I _see_..."

Greg took a deep breath, screwing his eyes shut tighter.

"I see a period of great prosperity for you, young Sorrensen. I see the position of swing shift trace tech opening before you, I see a recommendation letter signed by a dashing man named Stokes, another signed by an equally dashing, and some might say far more stylish man named _me_, and yet another signed by a tightly wound lab creature going by the name of Hodges..." he predicted, gripping her hand tighter as the falling rain drops grew fatter and fatter.

"I see a pay raise, I see health benefits, I see you affording decent coffee that doesn't taste like _pure liquid death_..."

He lost his footing for just a moment as she cackled ruefully and shoved her weight into him, but he regained the rhythm quick enough.

"And finally, I see you waking up one day to find you're ready to get back out there again with the pick of any guy you want in the _whole of freakin' Nevada_. And I see you coming with me to see Bass Jumpin' Jazz next week! Because you like that kind of stuff! And because I don't want to go alone!" he finished, opening his eyes to see her face alight beneath the dark but golden glow of the morning.

"Wow, that's some future! You're more gifted than I thought!" Nina gushed theatrically, holding her mouth open wide in the dopey way she did when doing imitations of the Valley girls they went to college with.

"It ain't no thang secret squirrel" he told her with a self assured wink.

"You know what? I think I'm feeling pretty psychic myself!" she called out with equal self assurance.

"That so? You gonna tell me my future shorty?" he asked with exuberance, rocking and rolling to the melody.

"Straight up! I see you, in an LVPD vest, with another new haircut you paid way too much for! And you're breaking a huge case, and...oh my god I can't believe it! Grissom is actually _impressed!_ He's promoting you to level three! And he's letting you go solo on high profile cases and everything!" announced Nina, though with not as much dramatic flare as Greg.

"Hot dog!" called Greg, raising his fist in the air as if everything she'd just mentioned had already come to fruition.

"Oh! And I see you getting all the credit you deserve, and you're acting all cocky about it too! It's _unbelievable"_ Nina continued, punching him gently in the ribs.

"Naturally" responded Greg, laughing harder than he had in awhile.

This pleased her, so much that she hugged him fiercely.

"I think we're gonna be okay! I mean, I'm not actually psychic but I think we really are!" she declared, the innocence she still held inside her pouring down as hard as the rain.

Her voice just the same as it had been when she told him that very same thing on the shores of Half Moon, after they both finally figured out they were in control of their own lives no matter what was going to happen.

"Hey Sorrensen! Don't take this the wrong way but..._duh_" he teased, not even giving her a chance to stick her tongue out at him before he messed up her soaking wet hair.

They danced on, for a time, each of them retreating into their own heads once again to ponder what lay ahead.

Greg watched as she broke from him, running around like Julie Andrews on a mountain top and spinning herself around the steel pillars as if they were maypoles.

He could smell the scent of her cherry blossom perfume still hanging in the air, with it was mixed the scent of lavender. It comforted him as he stood there recalling each and every time of change that had brought him to the very moment he found himself living out.

Standing on the crime lab rooftop, looking down upon Las Vegas as if he were its king.

His eyes were ever so slightly glossed as he watched Nina begin squeezing out the water from her clothing and darting her eyes over the ground as if she truly expected to miraculously find a towel there somewhere. He wasn't sure about all the things he was presently feeling toward her, but for the time being he was overwhelmed with a comfort that he'd never felt before in his life, just knowing she was alive on the planet, and no further than a phone call away whenever he might need her.

He thought of Anika Wilkes, and let himself believe his psychic powers were showing him a glimpse of true events as he envisioned her taking shelter in the embrace of her family, receiving brand new pictures from the nieces and nephews who loved her, and once again taking in the air as she played with her beloved pups.

Greg Sanders knew in that moment there would be more cases like the one he had just worked, probably more challenging than he could imagine just then. He knew there would once again be darkness to deal with, and that there would once again be silences threatening to break him.

But as he thought of his Vegas family, of Sara's mindmeld smiles and the unmatched knack Nick Stokes had for saving his ass just at the right time; as he watched Nina twinkling at him from her place beneath the helipad as she turned up the volume on the stereo with the sun finally breaking right through the clouds, he couldn't help but feel the light and the music were coming to get him anyway.

**THE END, and thank you to everyone who has been waiting for it. I really appreciate you reading and commenting, I hope this ending was satisfactory. As always, I welcome all commentary, both praise and criticism. **


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